Five decades of stopping the passing scene
Photographer has marked the changing face
of the Jersey Shore
JERRY WOLKOWITZ Milton Edelman of Bradley Beach has built an extensive archive of pictures of Long Branch and the surrounding communities that he has taken over five decades working as a photographer in the area.
It’s retro, it’s renascent — the passing scene of locals, landmarks and leisure times at the Jersey Shore captured with affection in the classic photographs and postcard scenes produced by local paparazzo Milton Edelman.
Beginning in the 1950s, Edelman recorded scenes ranging from throngs of sun worshippers on local beaches and boardwalks lined with amusements to gaudy arcades and restaurant openings.
"I photographed the arcade as an event. It’s a photographer’s way of recording a scene," said Edelman, who in the 1950s began to focus his camera on Jerseyana, ranging from a chess prodigy warming up for a tournament at a Shore hotel to the Haunted Mansion on the Long Branch pier.
Until the store closed, Edelman’s photos were available at Vintage Photos of the Jersey Shore, a shop he operated at the Seaview Square Mall, Wanamassa section of Ocean Township. Currently, he sells his retrospective photos at local craft shows like the Bradley Beach Boardwalk Craft Fair scheduled for Memorial Day weekend.
Edelman’s entrée into photography came via the GI Bill. After an overseas stint with the U.S. Air Force during World War II, he returned to his hometown and studied at the Baltimore Institute of Photography.
"I was always interested in art, but didn’t have the talent for commercial art," he explained. "I decided on photography because I loved art and liked mechanical things, and I figured photography was a happy medium."
But jobs were hard to come by when he graduated in 1949, and he moved up to Asbury Park and worked as a waiter at a nearby country club.
Edelman moved to Texas in 1950 and bought a photography studio in Crystal, a small town below San Antonio, 40 miles from the Mexican border. It was his first business venture and proved to be a valuable training ground.
"I learned a lot about photography, believe it or not," he said. "The studio I bought was built as a daylight studio so I was working only with daylight. Part of the roof facing north was glass skylights, and the light was controlled with shades. For one year, I worked doing portraits entirely with daylight.
"I got remarkable results. I learned how to judge light, natural light. The results you can get from natural light are really remarkable. That’s the way the old masters did it centuries ago.
"I did portraits and news events for the local newspaper," he said.
And there were frequent small-town weddings.
"On a Sunday, if there was a wedding at the church, it was a tradition, after the service the whole wedding party would come right to the studio without an appointment," he recounted. "I would go to the studio and wait and the whole wedding party showed up."
And portraits of children were commissioned on trust.
"On any Saturday I could count on about 10 mothers coming in with their babies and asking me in Spanish if I would photograph their children," recalled Edelman. "There were no appointments; they would just walk in the door. Most were farm workers. I’d do a portrait, and they’d give me a dollar down and $1 per week. Portraits cost about $7-8. Every week they would come and give me the $1. I never lost a nickel."
In 1955, Edelman sold the studio and returned to Asbury Park where he worked at Storyland Village in Neptune, then segued into what was one of his favorite jobs as a convention photographer at the Monterey Hotel on Sixth and Ocean avenues in Asbury Park.
One of his favorite photos is one he took there in 1957 of 13-year-old chess prodigy Bobby Fisher playing a practice game with an older gent. "His younger sister was sitting next to him drinking a soda," Edelman recalled. "I still have that picture."
He opened a photography studio in Oakhurst around 1962, concentrating on weddings and portraits, while continuing to record scenes of the Jersey Shore.
"I did a lot of color postcards during that time of the entire Shore area — Long Branch, Ocean Grove, Asbury Park," he said. His photos recorded Shore images from the now-vanished pier at Ocean Avenue to Asbury Park icon Tillie to San Alfonso’s Retreat House in the West End.
Edelman’s postcard scenes fell into two categories.
"Basically there are two types of postcards," he explained. "Advertising, which has to do with commercial ventures like restaurants and motels, and [the] local view, which captures the local flavor and is of general interest.
"Any photographer has a feeling of the passing scene, what is worthwhile recording," he said. "I have this artistic feeling that this excites me and I shoot it, sometimes just for my own pleasure because I like it.
"It could be people at the beach, children building sand castles, sunset scenes at the marina in Belmar, one of my favorite places."
There are times when he revisits a scene, he confided.
"When I came here, I worked a couple of weeks as a busboy at a hotel in Asbury Park. I photographed it again last year," he said, "just to show the ruins of the Metropolitan Hotel."
Edelman remains active as a photographer for local groups, and his work has been featured in historical exhibits and can be found on a Web site devoted to the revival of Asbury Park.
His photo work for postcards appears in "Greetings from New Jersey, a Postcard Tour of the Garden State," by Helen Chantal Pike, and the Eatontown author said his photographs of Asbury Park will be included in her upcoming book, Asbury Park’s Glory Days.
While he no longer maintains a studio, Edelman still develops his own black-and-white film, and he holds several provisional patents for modifications of photo equipment.
Edelman also is the repository of a cache of glass plate negatives of photographs by Frank Jones, who photographed the local scene in the early 1900s. A family friend, Edelman inherited the glass plates that include scenes of a 1907 fire on the West End and turn-of-the-century Broadway.
A collection of glass plates he purchased yielded the original plates for portraits of Mark Twain and Buffalo Bill.
But he said he was unaware of the historic value of his own work when he was focusing on "those glorious days" at the Shore.
"I didn’t think of it as preserving history at the time," Edelman said of his almost 50 years of photographing the Jersey Shore. "Part of it was the possibility of selling and the other is that I liked to do it.
"Was I a historian? I was a recorder of the passing scene," he mused.