CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/5/2024

Celebrate summer with Tony Caramanico’s Montauk Surf Journals

In 1978, Montauk surfer Tony Caramanico took the advice of his boss and mentor, photographer Peter Beard, and began keeping a daily journal, which he has maintained every day since, without exception. “What began as simple notes on the day’s waves slowly evolved. A printout of a surf article here, a business card there,” surf journalist Zach Raffin writes in Damiani’s new book collecting the best of more than 16,000 visual journal entries made over the last half-century. “By 1980, the journals had taken on a whole new life. Opening up one of these duct tape-bound, eighteen-inch thick binders invites one on a mind-numbing journey of colorful exotica through the lens of surf culture. Layered with pop cultural moments from old Tylenol and bikini ads to the Iran hostage crisis and Clinton’s impeachment, the journals act not only as a ledger of Tony’s immense surfing life but a life well lived through four decades of profound cultural evolution. And that’s all before we mention the travel. Morocco. Indonesia. Egypt. Tobago. Jamaica. Kenya. France. Japan. China. All in pursuit of that same mythical feeling he first achieved at age thirteen. … Tony Caramanico is many things. A historian. An accomplished competitive surfer. An artist. A devoted husband. A quintessential Italian New Yorker with the mustache to boot. And while all true, Tony Caramanico is, first and foremost, a lifelong surf-obsessed kid from Amityville, New York, who still gets up and checks the waves every single day.”