By Michael Dweck. 2004, Harry N. Abrams Books.

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For most of my life, I've assumed that I was just a year or two away from living the sort of life to which I aspire. That is, the life of an easy-going, devil-may-care adventurer. Barring that, I always figured I'd live in the mountains of Appalachia or somewhere along the coast, sitting shirtless on the back porch of a run-down but pleasant beach house, sipping bourbon, thinking about going surfing, and pressing up against the tan body of a bikini-clad beauty in the hammock with me. So far, it hasn't quite worked out that way, but I do have a beauty by my side. Still, if I had to trade in the song and dance of the office for getting drunk on the beach and hammering out articles on a battered old Underwood, I wouldn't hesitate to pack my board shorts and be on my way.

The End: Montauk is photographer Michael Dweck's photographic chronicle of the end of Long Island, the sleepy fishing village that, in the 1970s, became a haven for East Coast surfers and, perhaps most importantly to this book, the ridiculously gorgeous, natural beauty surfer girls who were along for the ride. Dweck's black and white photos, reprinted here in a stunning oversized format, serve as a record of a hedonistic yet innocent time, when crab shacks and longboards were all that mattered, and Montauk was still something of an undiscovered East Coast Eden, albeit an extremely chilly one come winter time. I'm a sucker for any photo of someone standing on a beach next to a longboard, staring out at the ocean, and The End serves those up, although the focus of the book is undoubtedly the beach bunnies who seem prone to running down the beach naked with surfboards -- an activity I wholeheartedly endorse. The End isn't a record of Montauk the location, although a few of the town's landmarks are represented. Nor is it a representation of the larger Montauk culture, which in 1975 was still largely centered around salty fishermen and a few celebrities seeking isolation. It is, instead, a look at the hedonistic surfer beach culture that, quite frankly, seems astounding appealing to someone like me.

Dweck's photos are a mix of portraits, candids, and a few landscape photos, though people or manmade objects are almost always the focus of attention. I'm no art critic, no photography critic, so being ignorant as I am of various technical considerations, by overall opinion of The End and Dweck's photos is derived purely from whether or not I like them. And I don't like them; I love them. I also hate them, because few and far between are the photographic collections that seem to have been assembled based purely on the concept of going, "Hey Keith? Isn't this the life you wanted?" Shabby yet glamorous, run down yet refined, low key but striking, and innocent but sexy (both the men and the women), the photography in The End weaves a visual narrative of a lost era that may not even have ever existed in the first place. But we sure can have a hell of a good time visiting it in pictures.

Labels: Art