The Other Hampton

The Other Hampton: Photographs by Judy Tomkins / Text by Calvin Tomkins. Grossman Publishers, New York, 1974. ISBN # 0670529400. Bridgehampton, as the name implies, is a town in between. It lies about midway between Southampton and East Hampton, two of the wealthiest and most fashionable beach resorts on the Atlantic seaboard, but until recently Bridgehampton attracted few of the wealthy or the fashionable. It has retained and still retains, clings to, its 300-year-old traditions as a farm town, although more and more of the potato fields are passing into the hands of real estate investors.....Bridgehampton also differs from its more elegant neighbors in that more than half its year-round residents are black...."In the spring of 1971, Judy Tomkins began photographing some of the black people in Bridgehampton. What she had in mind were portraits - portraits of individual men and women and children, in their homes, or, as it so often turned out, on their front porches.