Montauk calls itself “The Finish,” but it surely by no means appears to achieve an endpoint. Fairly the other. It’s in a steady state of starting, beginning again and again however by no means actually coming to a conclusion of what it truly is. All of the goals humankind has placed on it appear to finish earlier than they’re realized. Consistently in flux, like its shoreline that will get formed by storms and the tide, Montauk appears by no means to completely understand itself. It’s on a distinct path than East Hampton or different Hampton villages. These locales solidify their standing as fortresses of wealth as they suck up ever extra upper-class households with rising appetites for native produce and wine, flying jets and helicopters out to $5,000-per-square-foot houses. East Hampton and Southampton are ends in themselves. The Maidstone Membership, Additional Lane, and Gin Lane are endpoints of an expensive dream in these cities. Montauk is completely different. It’s extra fluid, actually.
Article continues after commercial
Montauk is a hamlet on the easternmost tip of the south shore of Lengthy Island. 4,000 individuals name it their residence year-round, and 40,000 individuals go to in the summertime, largely attracted by its pure magnificence and seashores. Ditch Plains is Montauk’s most well-known seaside, though almost definitely not its most lovely. The best way the rocky shore slopes gently into the ocean creates lengthy rolling waves preferrred for surfers.
Montauk’s historical past is paved with unrealized goals and reinvention. The title comes from the Montaukett tribe, who lived within the space earlier than white settlers arrived within the seventeenth century. After a conflict with one other tribe in 1653, the Montauketts have been severely weakened and ravaged by smallpox. They offered the areas of immediately’s Napeague and Montauk to white settlers in return for meals and have been allowed to stay on elements of the offered land. On the finish of the nineteenth century, Arthur Benson purchased 10,000 acres of the East Finish and Huge Reed Pond the place, after the 1653 conflict, the remaining Montauketts lived, and he requested Stanford White to design the primary houses at Montauk Level. The legitimacy of Benson’s transaction remains to be contested in courtroom by the tribe immediately.
A railway connecting Montauk to New York Metropolis was constructed, as was a dock for ocean liners, to chop the journey time from London to New York Metropolis by a day. The thought was that passengers disembarking at Montauk and heading to New York Metropolis might journey the remainder of the best way by practice. Sadly, the plan didn’t work out, and the navy took over the land to quarantine troopers coming back from the Spanish-American conflict. After the First World Conflict, Robert Moses started condemning the Benson land to ascertain two main state parks on both finish of Montauk. This resolution set Montauk radically other than the remainder of the South Fork, which was primarily used as agricultural land with no state parks.
A few years later, Carl Fisher purchased a lot of the East Finish of Lengthy Island and dreamed of creating it into the Miami of the North, one other dream for Montauk that was shattered, this time by the good Wall Road crash of 1929. The Nice Hurricane of 1938 then turned Montauk briefly into an island. The Second World Conflict introduced a recent wave of navy funding and presence. Disguised as a fishing village, Camp Hero was established as a coastal protection station in opposition to German submarines. Rumors of teleportation and time journey experiments carried out at Camp Hero beneath the code title “The Montauk Undertaking” have circulated to this present day and impressed one of many twenty first century’s most well-known TV reveals, Stranger Issues.
Within the ’60s, over 200 Leisurama houses, ready-made second houses for hardworking decrease and middle-class households, have been inbuilt Montauk and began Montauk’s ascent because the dream seaside location for American suburbanites. On the identical time, international pop artwork and rock and roll royalty took refuge in Montauk, as the remainder of the Hamptons was already totally established as a playground of the rich Manhattan elite. In Montauk, to this present day, every part and everybody collides, from hip surfers to native fishermen to middle-class households, trailer park inhabitants, and Mick Jagger.
There’s all the time the hazard one other hurricane might destroy downtown Montauk altogether or tear it off from Lengthy Island as soon as extra. It is a place the place individuals can dream massive or small, the place goals finish, and new ones emerge. There’s room for everybody and the goals they arrive with. There isn’t any dictatorship of privet hedge as in the remainder of the Hamptons. However right here, whether or not you’re a resident of a small motel room on the seaside, reside in a trailer off Ditch Plains, inherited a prefab “Leisurama” out of your mother and father, or tore down a ’50s equipment home and constructed a six-bedroom mansion with a helicopter pad, Montauk is the house for all these goals, and its seashores are the lounge. That is the place Nat Ward’s pictures begin their enchanting existence.
Consistently in flux, like its shoreline that will get formed by storms and the tide, Montauk appears by no means to completely understand itself.
There isn’t any place like residence, besides the seaside. We love the seaside simply as a lot as we love our houses. Merely put, the seaside is a house to us. The one distinction between our personal home house and the seaside is that there aren’t any partitions on the shore. However we nonetheless behave as if we have been at residence. Nat Ward’s pictures, taken primarily at Ditch Plains, Montauk’s well-known surf seaside, appear to show that. Folks love making the seaside their domicile, exhibiting the very intimate social habits usually reserved for one’s personal 4 partitions. Folks beautify their spot on the seaside with towels, umbrellas, surfboards, chairs, coolers, and extra, briefly recreating the fundamentals of a complete human family on an unlimited crystalline expanse. Folks construct castles, fortresses, and partitions behind which to flee the winds. They assemble fires, ditches, and short-term graves. They lie half bare within the solar, on high of one another, sprawled out on the nice and cozy silicon dioxide exposing cleavages, armpits, and butt cracks.
Once you watch actual property reveals, it’s fascinating how a lot worth is dedicated to privateness in your yard or the home itself. We do every part and spend plenty of cash to forestall strangers from with the ability to see us in intimate conditions, sleeping in our beds, taking part in within the yard, sprawled out on our sofa half-dressed, lounging by the pool, or having a shower. Besides, after we are on the seaside, we love doing all these items in whole public view and extra. There isn’t any disgrace, no prudishness on the seaside, a spot the place you must naked your self. You need to tan? You need to be bare.
Nat Ward’s pictures are extremely composed snapshots of the intricate social lifetime of the seaside. They aren’t static pictures, however there’s a mysterious earlier than and after that oscillates across the pictures, a narrative that could possibly be advised. The barking canine within the solar on his proprietor’s seaside towel who may need gone within the water or is clearly doing one thing someplace away from him that stresses the little man out. {The teenager} with a Prime Gun jet kite in his hand that’s nearly to raise off or crash. The three youngsters sitting on the sandy perimeter of the spherical shadow of a seaside umbrella that’s not within the image listening to somebody exterior of the body speaking to them whereas one barely older child is trying considerably of a down-dog yoga pose. The matriarch of a household in a Botticelli pose whereas a male member of her clan, maybe her husband or brother-in-law with a beer in his hand, appears to be like at her boobs and her arms as they stroke by her barely moist curly hair whereas perhaps her daughter takes a fast break from her telephone, and different family members are trying of their cooler for a chilly beverage or meals.
All these pictures inform bare, unedited tales of who we’re as human beings, social creatures, and households. These are tales that you just can not inform wherever else besides on the seaside as a result of hardly ever are we much less inhibited. Every part on the seaside is within the open, drama is tangible, pores and skin is touchable. On the seaside, we’re all soiled. All of us lie within the sand, stroll within the sand, and cleanse ourselves as we bathe within the ocean, solely to get soiled and sweaty once more. The seaside is the divide between one world, the dry, and one other, the moist. It’s a legendary place of transformation.
The seaside turns into a stage for human habits, and Nat Ward’s pictures create the proscenium arch for these home scenes. The individuals in his photographs are conscious that they’re being photographed. Typically they pose for the image, and typically they appear to disregard the digicam. Nat Ward isn’t a voyeur who hides his digicam beneath a towel to take secretive snapshots of unaware topics. He behaves like a documentarian, outfitted with a big digicam that attracts its personal consideration, and thus can’t be mistaken for an off-the-cuff pastime photographer. Like David Attenborough and his digicam workforce filming wild animals, Nat Ward is clear about what he does—solely his wild animals are individuals who consciously frolic and mull round in entrance of his lens.
A Shakespearian quote, or adaption of a Shakespearian quote, involves thoughts to specific who we’re:
All of the world is a seaside, and all women and men merely gamers within the sand.
__________________________________
From Ditch: Montauk, New York, 11954 by Nat Ward. Introduction by Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt. Afterword by Wayne Koestenbaum. Copyright © 2025. Obtainable from Powerhouse Books.
The Montauk Historic Society is honored to ask the general public again to the Second Home Museum for the primary time since 2013 to expertise a outstanding photographic exhibition on Might twenty fourth from 6-8 pm: “Ditch: Montauk, NY 11954″ by Nat Ward. It’s free and open to all. Donations are welcome.
