Scenes from New York // Part 1 of 3
New York, the city that never sleeps. I never really realized what that meant until now. It's a pretty fitting name for the place, as well as the people who live there. The smell of money in the air mixed with trash piled high in the streets. A blend of street vendor foods, and exhaust from constant bumper to bumper traffic. Long Island is a totally different story, however. A long stretch of highway, lined with forest and dotted with estates. As you drive along you might see a herd of deer lazily grazing in a meadow, or a Benz dealership...We were in the Hamptons, after all.
I've decided to divide these posts into three parts: Montauk, The Surf Lodge, and the City. We also want to give a special thanks to Vans for making this trip happen, and putting on such a rad event!
When I heard I was going to go on a trip to New York for a Vans event, I knew I was going to be shooting black and white film. I've always had a special connection with black and white film, since that's what I used when first started taking photos. There's just something infinitely more satisfying about developing and scanning your own film, rather than shooting digitally and not caring about most of the images you take.
The lighthouse in Montauk was on our list of things we must see. Unfortunately a storm rolled in, and due to all the rain and lightning, they wouldn't let us go to the top of the structure. We all got soaked, and I managed to only take one photo with Nick assisting me (aka holding a towel over my camera). I personally really liked the rain; it offered up a respite from the heat, as well as a different view of the East Coast than we expected to see.
In California, if a storm is rolling in, you generally don't think to check the surf. However, we still felt like we needed to check it out while we were there. We found a windswept beach with some one foot chop rolling in, and no one was really all that psyched to get out there. But hey, we tried!
Pretty crazy that only a few days earlier, a large hurricane brought epic conditions to Ditch Planes. It was Lake Montauk when we were there.
At this point we'd had enough of the rain, and made our way over to the Surf Lodge. Vans had to cancel all activities that Friday due to the storm, but that just meant that Saturday was going to be jam packed with good times to be had.
Saturday morning after breakfast we headed down to Amagansett to see our friends at Pilgrim Surf + Supply. We were told that Paul McCartney and Alec Baldwin were just there, and that we had missed them. Strangely, it wasn't all that surprising to hear that, considering we were in the Hamptons.
Words and Photography by Thomas Green
Camera: Canonet ql17
Film: Fuji Acros 100 and illford Delta 100