Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

Surf publishing was a nonstop growth industry throughout the 1980s, with increased ad revenue, new titles, bigger issues, more color. The trend was worldwide but most obvious in America. In the late 1970s, 

 had both gone monthly, and the average issue size was just over a hundred pages. By 1988, both magazines were producing copies at 

-like two-hundred-plus pages, and circulation for each was about 110,000—more than double the size of their nearest rivals.

. Japan, South Africa, France, Brazil, Peru, New Zealand, and Spain each supported at least one surf magazine—all were essentially 

 cheerfully decorated its covers with English-translated blurbs like, “The Best Left Barrel that Accepts the Best Surfers Only,” and “Japanese Surfers on the North Shore: Go and Get.”

The cult of the surf photographer grew as well—a tradition going back 20 years to Ron Stoner’s short but brilliant 

 career. Even with all the new jumbo-sized magazines, only two dozen or so surf photographers worldwide were pulling down a middle-class-or-better wage. But money wasn’t really the point. It was the travel, the flexible schedule, and the endless hours of beach time. It was also the only glamour job in the sport, apart from being a pro surfer. Again, this was particularly true in America, where photographers like Jeff Divine, Dan Merkel, Warren Bolster, Don King, Steve Wilkings, Aaron Chang, Larry “Flame” Moore, Art Brewer, and Jeff Hornbaker were regularly featured in profiles with the same heft and detail as those given to Gerry Lopez, Shaun Tomson, and Tom Curren. Chang’s 1988 

 feature profile included a hemispheric map of his travels from the previous year, a shot of the photographer himself jamming a cutback, and a Q&A that touched on Chang’s love life and a recent struggle with “psychological burnout.”

The French mags did the same with Sylvain Cazenave, their best surf photographer, while the Japanese feted Hiroshi Sato. The Aussies were the exception—although gifted Sydney-based photographers Hugh McLeod and Bruce Channon bought the venerable but down-at-heels 

, gave it a smart design makeover, and generally transformed the magazine into something more like a 

 photography artbook than a garden-variety surf publication.

Surf photography had branched out since the Stoner era. No sport in the world, in fact, was shot from so many angles. Surfers were photographed from underwater, from helicopters, from the back of a Jet Ski running full-throttle just ahead of the wave, and from a wide-angle board-mounted camera operated from the beach by remote control. A British newcomer named Angus Chater attached a camera to the end of an eight-foot aluminum pole, which he hoisted up like an Iwo Jima flag-raiser while floating over the wave crest, shooting down on the rider with a trigger device welded into the pole’s base. Black-and-white photography made a comeback. Brewer, Chang and Hornbaker did portraiture work that was just a step or two behind Annie Leibovitz.

Water photography was completely overhauled. The waterhouse-covered camera—so heavy and cumbersome in the 1960s that the photographer had to ferry it into the channel atop his board—had slimmed down to a ten-pound unit that could be held like a lunchbox and taken into the heart of the impact zone. By 1984, a former Stanford University water polo player named Don King was shooting not just from the mouth of the tube as the surfer raced toward him, but flipper-kicking his way to the other side to capture the epiglottic view from the 

 the surfer. On a good day at Pipeline or Backdoor in Hawaii, where most of the era’s best surf photography took place, King and the rest of the water specialists worked their craft with the timing and precision of knife-throwers. They embedded themselves in the wave as it lifted vertically and fanned out overhead, kept the camera trained on the surfer (a new feature called autofocus was a godsend to surf photographers), waited for the money shot (when the surfer was from six feet to six inches away), pulled the trigger, and then burrowed into the wave’s interior before they were sucked into the whitewater mangle.

Professional surfers and photographers worked together often—and it was work, since everybody’s paycheck depended to one degree or another on a steady feed of magazine photos—and the whole operation became practically choreographed. It was much less risky than it looked. King and the rest of the A-list photographers rarely got pitched over the falls, and could shoot an entire season without so much as brushing up against their subject. Cameras themselves were occasionally rammed and “drowned.” There were plenty of bumps and bruises. But no surf photographer died in action until 2005, when 33-year-old Jon Mozo of Hawaii drowned after hitting the reef at Pipeline on what was by all accounts a middling six-foot day.

Surf photography was given a mainstream benediction in 1985, when 

 published a 14-page cover story titled “Surf’s Up! Aaron Chang Shoots the Curl and Lives to Tell About It.” Chang, from San Diego, was the exotic-looking son of a Scottish mother and Chinese father. In his 

 portrait he radiates mid-'80s surf-cool: turned-up shirt collar, moussed hair piled into a wavy black nest, a tripod-attached Nikon slung like an M-16 over his shoulder. Chang was the sport’s best all-arounder, equally skilled shooting from the water, the beach, and in the studio. And he knew how to give a quote. Crowds of photographers on the North Shore had turned the winter season into a “real maggot scene,” he said, and the low-paying surf magazine editors had turned his life into that of “an indentured servant.” This wasn’t exactly true—around the time of his 

 profile, Chang was making $50,000 a year, plus expenses.

Chang also said, with an attractive low-voiced sincerity, that when entering the ocean he “strongly feels the presence of God”—and by such rude-to-sacred means he did his part to uphold surfing’s reputation as something out of the ordinary.

Don King and the rest of the water photography specialists worked their craft with the timing and precision of knife-throwers. King, at his best, was able to capture the epiglottic view from the 

 the surfer, looking out toward daylight.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Cult of the Surf Photographer

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