South Beach’s residents were a tribe, with its own gathering places, leisure pursuits, and cultural rituals. Andy Sweet’s pictures give us a solid, painstaking sense of what this tribe’s life looked like, day in and day out.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Miami Beach was Rat Pack glamorous: a tropical tourist attraction with lavish shoreline hotels offering performances by stars like Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason.
Sweet grew up in Miami Beach, in a well-to-do Jewish family. In 1977, along with his friend Gary Monroe, another local photographer, he embarked on a ten-year project of capturing the daily life of South Beach’s Jewish residents.
There is certainly a sense of elegy in Sweet’s work, for a South Beach culture that was not long for this world, and that soon gave way to what Brett Sokol identifies in a foreword to “Shtetl in the Sun” as the city’s much flashier “Miami Vice” eighties and American Riviera nineties. But Sweet’s pictures are neither sentimental nor pathetic.
South Beach’s residents were a tribe, with its own gathering places, leisure pursuits, and cultural rituals, and the pictures give us a solid, painstaking sense of what this tribe’s life looked like, day in, day out. We often see them in groups: playing shuffleboard, wading into pools, exercising or reclining on the sand, taking constitutionals along the wide, glaring avenues.
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