Beach Paradise – The End: Montauk, N.Y. 10th Anniversary Edition

By Tiffany Wen

In the early 2000s, New York-based photographer and artist Michael Dweck documented a hidden surf community in Montauk, N.Y., a Long Island fishing community. By 2004, Dweck transformed the work into a solo show at Sotheby’s New York and then an iconic photographic journal known as “The End: Montauk, N.Y.”

The End: Montauk, N.Y.

Filled with nostalgic black- and- white images of surfers and nude women, the collection is an artistic and erotic homage to the surf village and lifestyle. “It is an evocation of a real-world paradise lost: the paradise of summer, youth, and erotic possibility—an American version of the Arcadian vision,” writes editor Christopher Sweet of Dweck’s original work. “Blending nostalgia, fantasy, and documentation, the photographs present a compelling portrait of a place in time and a way of life at once fading and being reinvented with each new season.”

Now, more than 10 years later, Dweck is releasing an expanded 10th Anniversary Edition Box Set of “The End: Montauk, N.Y.,” originally hailed by Hamptons Magazine as “the ultimate homage to the sun-kissed surfing life…” The set will feature 85 previously unpublished photos depicting the evolution of Montauk, New York over the last decade or so and personal essays by Dweck and fellow photographer and writer Peter Beard. Printed and bound in Italy, each limited- edition book (300 numbered copies packaged in a clothbound clamshell case) also comes with an exclusive 11 x 14 signed gelatin silver print “Surf’s Up” (Montauk 2006), which art-lovers are sure to appreciate.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the $3,000 book will go towards maintaining the waterways and beaches of Long Island and the U.S. through the Surfrider Foundation and the Ocean Conservancy.