Coney Island Summer by Syndi Pilar

Coney Island Summer is an ongoing series that I started shooting in 2023. In it, I aim to capture timeless charm of the people's playground through black and white imagery. By stripping away the distractions of color, the energy, emotion, and atmosphere inherent in the scene are allowed to shine through. As a place steeped in history and affection, Coney Island serves as a bridge between past and present, capturing the essence of nostalgia while celebrating its enduring vibrancy.

Coney Island holds a personal significance for me. It represents an escape—a place by the water that retains the city’s vibrancy while offering relief from its chaos. On the boardwalks and beaches, families and individuals each live their own stories. My work focuses on capturing genuine moments of connection and respite, rather than the flamboyant characters often associated with Coney Island. This choice reflects my interest in portraying authenticity and illustrating a shared human search for rest and joy.

By removing the distractions of color, monochrome photography emphasizes texture, light, and emotion, offering a universal connection. My images combine strong graphic compositions with an intimate and expansive feel, highlighting the unique atmosphere of Coney Island.

Through this series, I aim to celebrate the extraordinary within the ordinary, where every face and scene tells a story.

Syndi Pilar
Syndi Pilar is a New York City based street photographer. She holds an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts and has a successful career as an Emmy award-winning TV editor. While her journey into photography officially began in college, it was the onset of the 2020 pandemic that re-ignited her true passion for the craft.

Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including The ICP Concerned show in New York in 2020, The Women Street Photographers annual NYC exhibits in 2021 and 2023, and various international festival group shows. In 2024, She received third place in LensCulture's Street Photography competition. Her photographs have been published in several books and online news outlets.
www.syndipilarphotography.com
@syndipix

Diana Markosian: Father

By Diana Markosian

Publisher : Aperture

2024 | 144 pages

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate and engrossing diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection, recounted through documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera.

Diana Markosian: Father presents the photographer’s journey to another place and another time, where Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger—her long-lost father. The book explores her father’s absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. The images, made over the course of a decade, take place in her father’s home in Armenia. In Markosian’s first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Father uses both documentary photographs and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the fifteen years of absence and separation from the photographer’s childhood. In this voyage of self-discovery, Markosian touchingly renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?”

All About Diana Markosian

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images

By Aperture

Publisher : Aperture

2024 | 312 pages

The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combatting racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.

Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them.

The Minimalist Photographer: 50 techniques for capturing beauty in simplicity

By Antony Zacharias

Publisher : Laurence King Publishing

2025 | 144 pages

Find out how to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary with this guide to minimalist photography.

With advice on composition, balance, shape and texture, this book takes inspiration from the masters of minimalism to demonstrate how stripping a subject down to its very essence can help you craft beautifully bold and unique images.

Illustrated with the finest examples of the style from the likes of Fan Ho, Imogen Cunningham, Michael Kenna, Berenice Abbott, William Eggleston and Horst P. Horst, this book guides you through the key techniques that define minimalism and provides easy-to-follow advice for how to create your own minimalist images that are visually striking in their simplicity.

Alan Schaller: Metropolis

By Alan Schaller

Publisher : TeNeues

2023 | 240 pages

In his coffee table book Metropolis, Alan Schaller presents city life in his own individual way, setting standards in modern street photography. For all lovers of spectacular black-and-white photography, the coffee table book Metropolis is a must-have, because there is hardly anything comparable on the market. In a unique way, Alan Schaller depicts urban contrasts that big cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo or Istanbul hold in store in their architecture and everyday life. In the photo book Metropolis, Alan Schaller elevates city views to an art form, playing with light and perspective and creates a world in black and white that captivates the viewer. This is what fans of Schaller love about his work. The photo artist manages to capture moments for eternity. Accompany Alan Schaller in his coffee table book Metropolis on 240 pages through the most famous metropolises on earth. Look forward to impressive black-and-white photographs, with extraordinary city views in which people and architecture merge in an intimate moment.

Coney Island Summer by Syndi Pilar

All About Syndi Pilar

Selected Books