Brooklyn Native Publishes ‘Yearbook’ Of Montauk

One year ago, a nine-weeks-pregnant Car Pelleteri and her husband, Victor Chu, biked out to Ditch Plains Beach to interview and photograph Montauk-based writer/director Allan Weisbecker—just one name on her notebook’s list of 12 contacts, penned in black Sharpie.

The remaining ranged from third-generation restaurateurs to reformed drug smugglers, though this cast of characters had one commonality: Montauk, explained Ms. Pelleteri, who recently published their faces and memories into a “yearbook” of sorts, she said, called “Surf+Turf: Montauk”—of which there are just 500 copies.

“I think Montauk is an amazing gem at the end of Long Island,” she said last week during a telephone interview from her home in Brooklyn. “I feel like I’ve made a little bit of history in the book.”

Ms. Pelleteri first visited the sleepy, increasingly hip beach destination in 2000—14 years after the Brooklyn native first picked up a camera at age 10—while shooting a fashion catalogue for Macy’s. She fell for the hamlet immediately and kept coming back.

“Because of the peace, the excitement and the good feelings Montauk gave me during all of my visits there, I wanted to make portraits. That was my first thought,” she said. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I want to make something with depth and meaning. A big project.’”

She brought her rudimentary portrait idea to Connie Keller, who managed the East Deck Motel at the time. There, she acquired a list of Montauk’s “characters” to track down from motel owner Alice Houseknecht. And she got to work.

Over the next two years, riding a rented bicycle from the Montauk Bike Shop, Ms. Pelleteri trekked back and forth across “The End,” putting faces to the names in her notebook—among them restaurant owner Perry “Chip” Duryea, surfer Leif Engstrom and 1970s transplant Mr. Weisbecker, who remembered his marijuana-smuggling days around Montauk’s tip, when he transported 20,000 pounds of product in a 70-foot banana boat from Colombia to Connecticut.

Generally speaking, Ms. Pelleteri’s subjects were cooperative and willing, she said, though she was initially met with skepticism from photographer and filmmaker James Katsipis.

“When I met him, he had such the tough guy attitude. I was afraid that he was going to beat me up,” she recalled. “I’m not joking.”

With a little convincing, he opened up, she said, soon reminiscing about his Montauk childhood. He even stripped off his tank top, allowing her to shoot his namesake tattoo stretching across his upper back.

“I think the book, overall, is an excellent documentation of Montauk’s finest—the people who make Montauk, Montauk,” Ms. Pelleteri said. “Montauk wouldn’t be the same if they were different people.”

The tourist boom that brought many now-locals to the East End began half a century ago, according to Phil Berg, a heavy equipment operator who was photographed for the book wearing a Viking hat, seated on his Harley Davidson motorcycle next to his dog.

“This town is really special, and what’s special is everybody about my age came here in the ’60s and ’70s and we fell in love with this place” Mr. Berg explained during an interview with Ms. Pelleteri. “We did whatever it took for us to live here. Back then, you couldn’t push a computer or make a billion dollars and live here.”

However, the locals have seen a rapid change in recent years, Mr. Katsipis said. “I feel like my town is being ripped from me,” he said.

Ms. Pelleteri saw it, too, during her research, and knew she had to act fast. In her two years documenting Montauk, she watched the town evolve even as she grew close to the locals and the land. In May, she finished what she started with the production of “Surf+Turf: Montauk,” and preserved a bit of history in the process.

“Change is inevitable,” she said. “It happens everywhere.”

Car Pelleteri will display a collection of her photographs from Sunday, August 31, through September 25 at the Montauk Beach House. For more information, visit montauksurfturf.com.