Beard showed Caramanico an artistic technique called “rubbing”, where they would use a now banned industrial cleaning fluid to transfer images and cuttings from newspapers and magazines and transfer them onto journal pages. “In late ’78, I moved in with Peter and started keeping a larger journal – big format with a lot of art in it, documenting my travels and my lifestyle,” he explains. “That all came from Peter. We worked on journals together for many years – we would prep up the pages with these rubbings using fluids that were very dangerous, and we would do this for like 12 hours in a row, all nighters and hang out and smoke and drink and do a couple of little substances. It was wild.”
Now, his new book Montauk Surf Journals, collects and presents several of his most detailed entries from the past half century. Records are scrawled of his days “building boards”, “overcast skies” and having “dinner with Rustie”, while interspersed with collages, sketches and headline cuttings from the news stories of the day (“Get moving by noon Bush tells Saddam”). The entries form a lucid vision of the times through the lens of surf culture, and Caramanico’s travels across the globe.
Surfing, and the opportunities the sport brought, took him to picturesque places across the world including the Caribbean, Hawaii, and even as far as Southeast Asia. “I knew I was onto something really cool, I was hanging out with the best surfers in the world,” he says. “I would spend months in Japan, then go over to Bali and it was a great experience, so I documented all of that – everything was about surfing and that was my slant on my lifestyle.”
