Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

Surfers as a rule didn’t trust the media. Hollywood movies, 

 articles, Beach Boys singles—these were created by non-surfers, and they almost never got it right. What surfers really craved was in-house news and entertainment. Surf movies were a blast. Surf magazines were even better—or at least more versatile. They could be taken home, studied, collected, and referenced; they offered advice, opinion, and instruction. All those religious comparisons the sport grew so fond of—that began with surf publishing: 

 was known from its early years as the “Bible of the Sport.” As one of the magazine’s editors explained, “There’s the Koran, the Book of Tao, the Bible, and surf mags. All are used to reconfirm belief in a faith, a way of life. Ours just comes out monthly, that’s all.”

Surf magazines bloomed and died like hothouse flowers during the 1960s. No fewer than fifteen titles had come and gone worldwide by 1966, and in some cases the debut issue was also the final issue. In America, 

’s only rival. The quarterly era was finished, and by 1962 surf magazines everywhere were published monthly or every other month. Color was introduced, first on the cover, then on select interior pages. Issues got bigger. In five years, 

’s average page count went from 38 to 98. The 1965 edition of 

crammed one-thousand photos into 226 pages.

 magazine’s flattering 1966 profile of 

 publisher John Severson introduced him as “the most respected spokesman for the booming sport of surfing.” The article remarked on Severson's casual three-hour workday, and illustrated the point with a photo of the publisher reclined in his office chair with a rubber-thonged foot resting on his desktop.

Another celeb-in-the-making was artist Rick Griffin, who as a teenager launched a 

 cartoon strip featuring a cheerful half-pint grem named Murphy. Griffin's cartoon storylines couldn’t have been simpler, but his draftsmanship was first-rate, and he loaded his Murphy panels with 

 magazine-like detail and energy. The strip was an international surf-world hit. Severson put Murphy on the cover of 

, thousands of Murphy stickers were peeled and stuck on car windows, Murphy T-shirts and coffee mugs were available in better surf shops, and Murphy cartoon-strip imitators popped up by the month. (After recovering from a near-fatal car accident in 1963, Griffin did another year’s worth of Murphy strips, then moved to San Francisco. There, he became one of psychedelia’s fabled Big Five artists and put his shimmering acid-influenced hand to Fillmore concert handbills, Grateful Dead album covers, and Zap Comix.)

A handful of surf magazine photographers also enjoyed a sprinkling of surf-world fame. Most readers had at least a passing interest in the articles and columns. But everyone devoured the images. “It’s a dream magazine," as John Severson put it, "thanks to the photographers.”

At some level, surfing made things easy for the amateur lensman: the field is blue and pretty, decorated with water-reflected sunlight, and has kinetic elements—a dropping curl, bouncing whitewater, the surfer and board in motion—that endlessly play off each other. Anyone with basic camera sense can fire off a roll or two and get a few interesting shots.

Advanced surf photography, though, was difficult. Because the surfer moves on two axis (forward and side to side), a photographer in the pre-automated age had to master the double-handed “follow focus” technique, moving the camera body left or right to keep the surfer framed, while constantly adjusting the focus ring to keep things sharp as the surfer moves forward. Motordrives were available and in use, but the Kodak film everybody used cost enough that surf photographers mostly shot just one frame at a time, trusting their ability to lead the surfer like a clay target and fire away at the moment of peak action. There were other challenges: introducing non-blue colors (not easy while facing the ocean), and covering all the auxiliary angles—overviews and side views, pier shots, candids, and portraits. Finally, the well-rounded surf photographer also had to shoot from the water, which was a discipline unto itself, with separate cameras and lenses, a much lower yield, a work space that often put them in dangerously close proximity to breaking waves, and the added difficulty of having to do the whole thing in what amounted to a zero-gravity environment.

Tom Blake and John “Doc” Ball did most of the early surf photography spadework; 

 published portfolios of both men's work—Blake in 1935, and Ball in 1944. But there was no real market for surf photography until the early 1960s, when the surf press was established, and it was another two or three years before a low pedestal of celebrity was built under the feet of California-born photographers Don James, LeRoy Grannis, and Ron Stoner.

For their age alone, James and Grannis were both unlikely boom-era pioneers. Collectively, the surf world would never be younger than it was in 1966, but at that year’s black-tie International Surfing Hall of Fame awards it was 45-year-old James who finished runner-up in the Still Photographer division, and 49-year-old Grannis taking top honors. Both were part-timers. James was a Beverly Hills dentist, with a patient list that included Clark Gable and Cary Grant, and Grannis was a switchboard installer for Pacific Telephone. Both were also well-credentialed surfers. Grannis, a charter member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, was one of the plank-riding surfers featured in Doc Ball’s 1946 book 

. He didn’t begin taking photos himself until 1959, but within a few months he was a weekend fixture at the hot local surf breaks and making photo contributions to all the new California-published surf magazines; in 1962 he became the general manager of 

James began riding waves and taking photos in the mid-1930s, and he was there on the beach, camera poised, the day Waimea Bay was first surfed in 1957. Water photography was James’ strong suit; on the North Shore, he’d paddle out with a Plexiglas-housed Leica draped around his neck, straddle his board just off the impact zone, frame and shoot, and sprint for deeper water as necessary. Surf magazines began running James’ work in the early sixties; 

 soon followed; and a shot he took of California surfer Rusty Miller barreling down a ferocious Sunset Beach peak was a prizewinner at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Grannis also shot from the water, but usually stayed on the beach, hunched behind a wicked tripod-mounted Century 1,000mm lens that weighed seventeen pounds and looked like a bazooka aimed at the lineup.

Photographed backstage at the 1966 Hall of Fame awards in their dinner jackets, holding their winner’s trophies, Grannis and James looked like a pair of kindly uncles standing next to third-place finisher Ron Stoner, a square-jawed twenty-one-year-old with a distant half smile. Nobody said as much, but the Hall of Fame results that year had more to do with seniority than merit. Stoner had been hired by 

 just eighteen months earlier, and in that brief period he not only raised and reset all the creative boundaries of surf photography, he turned it into a profession.

Grannis and James—with jobs and families, and two or three decades older than the surfers they photographed—operated to a degree from the sidelines. Stoner was of the moment. He was young and good-looking, a decent surfer in his own right, and in constant touch with America’s hottest riders. More importantly, he had a vision of surfing that was broader, brighter, and more unified than that of Grannis or James. The smooth, glistening, color-saturated look of the boom’s final years—Stoner created it as much as he captured it.

He took one or two photography classes in junior college, and John Severson was an informal mentor. But as 

 art director John Van Hamersveld later put it, Stoner operated “completely on intuition.” (Van Hamersveld went further and wondered if Stoner was in fact an "idiot savant." Another photographer, with no malice intended, said that on a technical level, “all Ron really knew how to do was open the film box and stick it in the camera.”) Like Grannis and James, much of Stoner’s work consisted of front-on, tight-frame action shots of cutbacks, bottom turns, noserides, and trimming—the bread-and-butter images that all surf magazines required. But Stoner actually did his best work while meandering around the perimeter. He’d paddle 20 yards out beyond a group of surfers, turn, and shoot back toward shore during a quiet moment between sets. Or he’d climb a hill, turn and drop to his knees, and take a lineup shot with a field mustard grass spread across the bottom two-thirds of the viewfinder. Stoner picked up shades and hues that everyone else missed. He buffed and polished the everyday surf-world greens and blues until they looked new again. He did for Southern California surf breaks what artist David Hockney later did for Southern California swimming pools, and to the same effect: you didn’t want to just look at their work, you longed to step inside and become part of it.

 paid Stoner $500 a month—more than enough for groceries and rent on a studio apartment. The magazine also gave him a gas card, travel expenses, and the use of the high-end company-owned camera equipment, plus all the film he could shoot. It was a great job. Then, quickly, it all came undone. Schizophrenia, drug use, and electroshock therapy undid Stoner’s life and career, and before the decade was over he was a ghost on surfing’s fringe; still taking photos now and then, but about to set the camera down for good. Nevertheless, much of what looked best in surfing at that time—for 

Photographer Ron Stoner did for Southern California surf breaks what artist David Hockney did for Southern California swimming pools, and to the same effect: you didn't want to just look at their work, you longed to step inside and become part of it.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Beautiful from any Angle

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