“It felt like you were inside a Bruce Springsteen song,” said Joe Maloney, of photographing the Jersey Shore during the late seventies and early eighties. His retrospective exhibition, “Asbury Park and the Jersey Shore, c. 1979,” which opened at Rick Wester Fine Art last weekend, inspires fond feelings of nostalgia for summers past, especially in light of the recent reconstruction efforts at the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy.

Maloney focussed on Asbury Park because it was a “distinctly working-class, nonaffluent, semi-urban, slightly run-down beach town, with a music culture and a vibrant street life.” Through a strong emphasis on polychromatic photography, he captured a place that was once brimming with life—carnival rides on the boardwalk, bikini-clad teen-agers, landscapes in saturated hues and glowing lights. Maloney’s exploration of Asbury Park was a departure from his usual subject matter of suburban landscapes, and his choice to photograph the Jersey Shore was ultimately fuelled by “the urge to discover something immediate, concrete, and candid within the artifice of the resort-town culture.” Below is a slide show of his photographs of Asbury Park in its former glory.





1 / 14 Chevron Chevron “Two Girls, Seaside Heights, New Jersey,” 1980.

Photographs by Joe Maloney, courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art.