Stop 1.5...Revelation..

By the time we arrived in Narragansett, I had a much better understanding of why my camera focused on the oceans and kept navigating me to the shores where winter surf was abound.  It was some time after I returned from Montauk that I began to understand why I took pictures of surfers on that day, but it seemed to be a premonition of what was to come.  

I have a little shop on the eastern coast of Connecticut.  I sell home goods and art and found items from old antique fields and far away places.  It is a cool, bohemian shop in the midst of a preppy, yacht club kind of a crowd, so paying the bills was always a bit of a struggle.  I decided to host a bookshop in the back room of the space to help fill the place with wanderers that I hoped to become customers and with money enough to pay the bills.  It was an amazing combination of beautiful things and books-so many books.  

 On one November day, the store was slow and I spent my time roaming around looking at the products, trying on the jewelry and looking through the books. On a round table just in front were a group of books on all things sea-some Gray Main photography books, books on the best Chris Craft boats and a book on the 50 best surf spots in the world.  Something drew me to pick up the surf book-each page boasted a different location, best times to surf and amazing photographs of waves.  

I proceeded to the register and I bought the book.  I had no idea why I bought this book, but I did and I put it inside the camouflaged bag adorned with skull and crossbones on its front.  I brought it home, took it out and left it beside the couch not thinking much of it.  

 Sawyer, my oldest and at that time only son, gravitated to the book as soon as he got home from school.  He would look through the chapters, marvel at the waves and sharks and incredible images that we saw of the biggest waves in the world.  He asked me about geography and climate and the people that would ride these huge waves that we saw from page to page.  It became a daily conversation that transformed into a travel journey of the world right inside of our living room, inside of our minds and in the mind of a 5-year-old boy that shares the same wanderlust as his mommy. 

 After looking at it for a few days, I told him that mommy was going to do it.  

“Do what?” he asked.  

 Mommy is going to travel to all of these 50 surf spots and write a story about the things that I learn. 

 I am going to take pictures and learn about a life I don’t know about.  I am going to travel again, taste different tastes and sip different drinks from the entire world around.  This journey was going to be for me and of course, there will inevitably be trips that can be shared, but together or not, this was something that I had to do for myself-for my soul.  Lessons of lonely plane trips, failed photography moments, exuberant perfect shots and curious conversations are what I hope to see and experience, but whatever lie ahead, I am going to try it and see what roads appear that I never knew were there.   Part of the impetus to propel this journey forward is to ease the loneliness of motherhood and failed career starts, but another part is to do something better-show my son, myself and my partner a better version of myself and the person that I want to be.  

 For the better part of the last fifteen years, my camera has been a tool to pay the bills, which has come with some mild success and quite a lot of failure.  It has been a place to hide and a place to be seen.  And now that I look back on it, my passion for photography was never going to be found in the commercial world.  The pictures that I was meant to take would most likely never make me any money or gain me any sort of recognition, but they would make me feel something and encourage me to find something more.  Coincidentally, these are the very same things that I want to teach my son to see in the world.  

 Teaching Sawyer from the lessons of my life remains one of my most important missions as a parent.  When he asks me a question, even though his questions are endless, I always answer them in the best way that I know how.  When he falls down, I talk about how many more times that I have fallen than times that I have not and how much that has taught me in my life.  When he wants to try something new, I always encourage it and always make sure that he does his best.  There is no quitting until the end of the commitment and then we reassess.  When he listens to really bad music, I always require an infusion of something good-right now, we are really going hard into Eminem and to rap.  So, as I am teaching him the things that I know and don’t know, I am setting out to teach myself thing that I know and things that I don’t, but what we are both learning simultaneously is the art of travel both inside and out in the world. 

 As life would have it, page 1 in our 50 best surf spots in the world that we turn to.. Ditch Plains, Montauk.  So, without even knowing it, , the journey had already been laid out for me and what lies ahead most likely will take me the better part of the next 15 years of my life and just as I teach Sawyer, I only have to try and do my best and see it through to the end of where this takes me.

 And with that, I began to draw a map of the places that would be next stops-Narragansett, Barbados, Montreal, Iceland and then a respite to start making work in order to pay for the next round of trips.  

 So, the surf journey begins…

Montauk..Ditch Plains...Stop #1 of 50

I am not from California. I am not eighteen. I am not blonde-well, I pay to be, but I am not inherently so and I don’t know how to surf, yet somehow I have found myself on this journey of surf, photography, travel and self reflection. I don’t know exactly what has brought me down this road as in most avenues in my life, but I am here and I am quite liking the journey. This all started in August of 2019. I had spent most of the last decade as a stylist and then as a fashion photographer. When I had my son in 2014, a cataclysmic shift occurred within me, as does in so many new mothers, and I knew that I wanted to work, but I didn’t want to be away as much as my job required, so I decided to cut back and shoot in NYC and raise this new boy that suddenly arrived into our lives. Cutting back in the fashion industry coupled with being a woman behind a camera is a dangerous combination in the fashion world and resulted in an absolute collapse in my career as a commercial photographer.

Time seemed idle for much of the three years to follow. I was too restless to stay home solely with my son and too guilt ridden to ever leave him for a job that would take me away from him for too many hours in a day. So, I cooked a lot. I cleaned a lot. I went to a lot of museums to show Sawyer the world of art and photography and culture that I wanted him to be exposed to. I played a lot of music around the house, so he knew that The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, David Bowie and Joni Mitchell were the foundation of mommy’s spiritual education. The main problem with all of the activities above is that Sawyer was 1 and then 2 and then 3 and thus didn’t engage as much as I hoped that he would. So, I decided to meet him at his own level and get him involved in things that other babies did-classes. I guess that these would be called mommy and me classes, but in NYC, they were nanny and me classes and then a handful of gushing moms that thought that this was the absolute best song that they had ever heard. The best gym class that they could ever imagine registering for. And then, there was me. The one in the corner wondering how they could ever think that “The Wheels on the Bus” could ever compare to “Let It Be” or “Legalize It”. I scowled a lot. I tried to be upbeat for Sawyer, but he didn't like those classes much either, so it was a lonely time. This motherhood that I worked so hard to achieve-years of IVF and years of disappointment-felt a bit like a deception of sorts. I loved Sawyer more than anything in the world, but if I didn’t start learning how to enjoy my life, he wasn’t going to enjoy his. I had to make a change.

Like many New Yorkers-well Brooklynites as we were at the time, we packed up the toys and Tupperware and headed to Connecticut. We bought an 1800’s school house. Sawyer went to school for the first time. He liked it for the most part, but the first few months of drop off’s were like scene’s out of “Sophie’s Choice” both of us crying and me sobbing that this just couldn’t be worth it all of the way home. Eventually, he got into a routine and so did I. I had always dreamed of owning a store, designing interiors and eventually, creating my own products. My whole career in fashion was a bit of a sham actually because I always dreamed of styling room sets, photographing a beautiful object atop a pile of perfectly curated books, but I never did, so this was the time. This was the time of change and growing up and learning the ABC’s of the next steps in my life. So, I opened a store, started doing a lot of design and actually began to enjoy the life that I moved here to live. But…yes, always a but…I missed photography. I missed shooting and creating images and I missed seeing the world.

The most amazing thing about photography is that you are given the chance to observe people without them observing you-you get to be part of their world and when you are lucky, you get to see their fears. their vulnerabilities, their courage and right in between the moment that they notice that you are there and the time that they forget, you get your picture-you get the magic place. The magic when people are fully themselves and you can capture exactly who they are and they begin to tell you their story. Maybe that is what I missed most actually-maybe it was the conversations where nothing was ever said-the quiet between you and them and the storytelling that may be fact or fiction, but feels like truth to me. I wanted to tell stories again. I wanted to take portraits and I wanted to make work, but I didn’t want to make the work I was shooting prior. I wanted to do something completely and utterly for me. This all ruminated in me for several months before I did anything about it. I picked up my camera to shoot friends or family or Sawyer and occasionally, I took a really powerful picture, but I wanted to make a body of work. I wanted to actually look at something that I didn’t know very well and learn it. I wanted to shoot people, but not fashion. I wanted to give Sawyer a camera and let him figure out how to use it and how to see through it. I wanted to get lost for a while and not know when or how it would turn out.

And so, in the summer of 2019, I went to Montauk. I have been to Montauk several times in the past ten years-we bought a house not too far from there and had plenty a margarita at the Hideaway just outside of town, but this time, I went there to do something. I went there to shoot and I went there to shoot surfers. I don’t know why I decided to shoot surfers, but I did and so I went. Ashby and Sawyer joined me in the jeep with the top down, the Beatles playing and the warm summer air intruding only when there were cars stopped ahead or a traffic stop. We ate tacos, we drank margaritas and then we headed to Ditch Plains.

Ditch is a landmark in Montauk. It is a place that was once the home of locals and surfers in the know and now has become a bit of circus in the height of the summer chic that has become the Hamptons. The East End is not that place for me. It is where we had our first little house-where Sawyer lived for the first six months of his life, where my dad had a practice and my aunt was a teacher-it isn’t a fancy place for me. It was a home away from home of sorts. As we pulled the jeep into the parking lot, there were throngs of people all around. There were surfers and there were want to be surfers. There were bikinis and coverups that were bought on Madison Avenue and there were angry locals that resented the whole damn thing. It was a mixed bag of people, emotions and intentions. Sawyer and I headed toward the beach with our cameras-mine a bit bigger than his, but both equipped with what we needed to embark upon this new photo essay that I didn’t even know was about to begin. The weather was perfect, the swell was good and there were so many people in the water-so many people to shoot. I shot for a while-shot people paddling out, people waxing their boards, people catching waves, people falling down. I got what I came for and I enjoyed being in the sand, taking pictures and the feeling the haze of the margarita I had at lunch lulling me into the perfect mood of a late summer afternoon day at the beach.

As we drove back to the house from Montauk, the fatigue from a long day in the sun set in and everyone was quiet. My mind kept wandering and wondering why I was determined to shoot this story and why I felt this pull to shoot more in this direction. In any good story, there is a beginning that compels you, a middle that keeps you believing and an end that never seems to let you go. I am not quite sure yet if there is indeed a good story here or perhaps I am just muddling around in the beginnings of where it all is to go, but I can’t let the fear of not knowing the outcome outweigh my compulsion to write it all down, document it in pictures and follow along as I go. A few days after we shot in Montauk, we returned home on the ferry toward our home. Sitting on that ferry watching the shores of Long Island, the place that I was born, fade away, I knew that the things that I just shot and the journey that I had just embarked upon was something different than I had done before. As I sipped my last margarita of summer, I wasn't quite sure what that change would be, but the change was coming and at this point in my life, I was ready and waiting for it.

Where the cool cats eat in Montauk

Navy Beach 32-98 Navy Road. This is a super cool spot with tables on the sand, beer on tap and out of the fray of things. It has been found out, but is still very cool.

Duryea’s Lobster Bar-65 Tuthill Road. This place is beautiful. It is right on the water, you order at the counter and you feel that you are truly away from things.

The Gig Shack-782 Main Street. The Shack is right in the center of town and a local spot, which translates as one of the best spots. Great surf cuisine and cocktails make this a place not to miss in town.

John’s Drive In-677 Montauk Highway. Burgers and Ice cream. Best left to that.

Where the cool cats sleep in Montauk

Montauk Beach House-55 Elmwood Avenue. Cool hang in town and close to beach with rooms that feel like you are in a West Hollywood hotel infused with a bit of surf style.

Gurneys-290 Old Montauk Highway. Let’s face it. Gurney’s is fancy and expensive, but the real estate that they have right on the ocean is really hard to beat. It is newly renovated and really nice and they have igloos outside in the winter!!

Where the cool cats get their surf stuff in Montauk

Air and Speed Surf-795 Montauk Highway. This place is really cool and has awesome Montauk apparel and also offer surf lessons, rent boards and wet suits. Go show them some love when you are there.

Plaza Surf N’ Sports-716 Main Street. This shop rents all sorts of boards, wetsuits and beach gear. Take a look when you are out east.