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On Saturday, sea creatures of all sorts, including Bill de Blasio and his family, gathered in Coney Island for the thirty-second annual Mermaid Parade, a celebration of the beginning of summer. We sent Jonno Rattman to photograph the action surrounding the event, which now attracts nearly a million spectators. “There can’t be many places with a larger stretch of skin than Coney Island, let alone when the mermaids come in throngs,” he told me. Rattman said that he met “a variety of kind, carnivalesque eccentrics,” many of whom had been coming for years to what he described as a “fleshy free-for-all ritual of endurance, carnality, and fabulous regalia.”
All photographs by Jonno Rattman.
