Andrew Blauschild, a photographer, surf-business entrepreneur, and much admired and beloved fixture of the Montauk surf community, died on the evening of Aug. 19, shortly after catching his last wave on the north side of Montauk Point. He was 53.
It was a beautiful afternoon. It seemed the entire Montauk surf community had turned out for the last of Hurricane Ernesto’s swells sweeping into the coves on the Long Island Sound side of the Montauk Lighthouse.
Mr. Blauschild surfed for hours among friends, then emerged from the water ebullient. On shore shortly afterward he told friends he didn’t feel well. People quickly rallied to drive him west for help. He perished en route. The cause of death was heart failure.
An estimated 700 surfers, friends, and family gathered at Ditch Plain Beach on Sunday afternoon at a traditional surfer’s paddle-out to bid him farewell. Most of the huge crowd assembled offshore on surfboards, holding hands in prayer and celebration. At the center of the gathering friends placed Mr. Blauschild’s board, a model from his own former company, Kookbox. It floated there for the duration, friends occasionally placing flowers on its deck.
Mr. Blauschild’s parents, Frank and Jeanette Blauschild, his uncle, Doug Blauschild, and brother, Todd, watched the scene from the storied Ditch Plain Beach bench, an elevated perch overlooking the waves favored by their son and the elders of the surf community.
“Who knew?” Mrs. Blauschild reflected with amazement at her son’s local fame. Mr. and Mrs. Blauschild live in Spring Valley, N.Y., in Rockland County, and had only a fuzzy understanding of their son’s wide and deep roots here and the extent of the admiration for him.
Mr. Blauschild’s renown was global. Paddle-outs were also held in California, Hawaii, and Chile and likely in other locations. Tributes poured in from surf-world figures all over the world.
In his early years Mr. Blauschild had bounced around jobs in the New York City and South Fork music and club world, but his greatest achievements were photography, friendship, and connections in the surf world, and his collaboration with the famed surfer Joel Tudor to create the Kookbox surf company that made boards and apparel. By the time the company unraveled in 2013 over business disagreements, Mr. Blauschild’s photography career was taking off. This spring one of his images was the cover shot on the collector’s edition European magazine, Blue, for an extensive feature of his photography. The noted magazine The Surfer’s Journal featured his work and a profile in 2023. The magazine followed up by sending a film crew to follow him around the South Fork. The short film “Finding Andrew” was released last fall. Mr. Blauschild had shown locally and in Nantucket, New York, and Florida. He is represented by ARC Fine Art out of Fairfield, Conn.
Surfing drew Mr. Blauschild to Montauk in the 1990s. He never looked back. He did not own a house here — it was forever a dream — and instead rented and crashed with friends. Several years ago he purchased a Sprinter van, his home on wheels, which would appear at all the best surf spots when the waves were on.
Mr. Blauschild’s ties here were cemented through his uncanny ability to connect with people and through his photography. He made it his life’s mission to chronicle the region — Montauk and Springs in particular — and its surfers, in photographs that express a deep affection and devotion.
Mr. Blauschild’s photography was his calling card into the local surfing community. He worked closely with some of the East End’s top surfers to make iconic surfing images, but he also shot everyone else. With each image his community of friends expanded.
“He wanted to do the work, contribute to the surf culture that existed out here without exploiting it,” the gallerist and surfer Tripoli Patterson wrote in a tribute on Instagram. “He knew, he cared, he was honored to be a part of it so much that he became it.”
Since childhood, Mr. Blauschild was captivated by the natural world, his parents recounted. And his surf photography was as much about showcasing surfers as it was about showcasing the magic, beauty, and power of nature. In more recent years he turned his lens directly toward dewy mornings in Springs, wildflowers around Accabonac Harbor, the Montauk cliffs in the snow.
“If anything,” he told The Surfer’s Journal, “I see surfing as nature. That is what is beautiful about it. You’re connecting with some sort of cosmic energy, a pulse of energy that if you pull it back far enough you can trace it back millions of years.”
Andrew Blauschild was a New Yorker through and through. Born on March 22, 1971, in New York City, he lived his earliest years in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and attended P.S. 95 before his family moved north of the city to Rockland County. He graduated from the State University at Buffalo with a degree in psychology. He is survived by his mother and father, and his brother, Todd Blauschild of Suffern, N.Y.
At the end of the paddle-out on Sunday the huge crowd closed in together around Mr. Blauschild’s flower-adorned Kookbox board. The lasting image is of a multicolored flower with hundreds of tiny surfboard petals surrounding his spirit at its center.
“Drew brought people together,” his longtime friend Rick Solano reflected. “We all felt we had a special relationship with him. That was his gift, to make us all feel like we shared something special with him. . . . That final moment Sunday, that was Drew’s last piece of artwork.”
