Does anyone know who these sun-bonneted belles might be? The photograph was most likely taken between 1970 and 1980. The photographer was Ray Smith (1905-2004), who moved east after a career in high fashion and advertising, including a stint with a lucrative Ex-Lax campaign. He set about chronicling a much simpler community here in Montauk, covering civic meetings and social gatherings and working on assignment for the East Hampton Star.
Trophy fish, fire department dinners, Greenery Scenery parties and Chamber of Commerce affairs, Friends of Erin parades, Montauk School graduations, church weddings, parents and children, landmarks and landscapes, now long-gone restaurants like Little Park and the Flying Fish, animals and even family pets – Ray Smith covered the Montauk scene in photographs throughout the 1970s as well as number of years before and beyond.
Ray was a friend of the late T. Paul Darenberg, who inherited many of his photographs and negatives. The Darenbergs donated a large collection of those photographs to the Montauk Library Archives. Together with the negatives and a portrait of the artist himself, the photographs comprise the Ray Smith Collection in the Montauk Library Archives, 189 of whose photographs can be seen in digital form in the New York Heritage Digital Collections.
For more Throwback Thursdays focused on Ray Smith, click here: https://montauklibrary.org/throwback-thursday-swans-of-montauk/ or here: https://montauklibrary.org/throwback-thursday-happiness-is/. And kindly drop a line or a comment to identify people in Ray Smith’s photographs.
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