SUNDAY JOINT, 3-10-2024: FOCUS GROUP – SHIRLEY ROGERS, JANA FRYE, LOUISE SEVERSON

Hey All,

I aim the Joint downfield, pull back and let fly, and it always more or less lands on target, but only after veering in directions unplanned—in some cases unknown; I often bang stuff into the Joint that I find in momento—and that is very much where we are today. I took aim at Shirley Rogers. Easy choice. Anyone with a passing knowledge of late ’70s and early ’80s surf media has aimed his or her attention at Rogers, a photographer with surpassing talent and Hedy Lamarr beauty, who was both over- and underexposed. But I can’t get to Rogers without first talking about Jana Frye, and I can’t talk about Jana without at least mentioning Louise Severson, which is maybe, possibly, where you’d start a conversation about the first female surf photographer.

In a technical sense, Louise Severson was not a surf photographer—she took surfing pictures regularly, yes, but the job title and the gender, in the 1960s, simply did not snap together, you might as well be talking about a donkey plumber or a Broadway asteroid. She married John Severson just before SURFER launched in 1960, and theirs was a love-match, a partnership of equals, and they went the distance, together nearly 60 years until John’s death in 2017. Early on, John taught Louise the basics of surf photography, the idea being that he’d have a second pair of hands while on the North Shore, and the photos of hers that ran in SURFER during the early 1960s were either uncredited or credited to John.

That’s Louise, above, at Sunset Beach, with John riding in the background. The photo appears at the front of John’s 1964 book Modern Surfing Around the World, along with the dedication: “To my wife, Louise, who manned the camera for endless hours while I surfed.” The wording is cringy and even sad from way up here in 2024, but sweet in its own way and written with the best intentions, and anyway that is about as good as it got for women in the surf media during surfing’s post-Gidget boom.

Jana Frye, on the other hand, ten years later, was very much a surf photographer, and recognized as such—except she was done almost as soon as she got started. Her career lasted just a bit longer than her nine-month marriage to Cocoa Beach surf-Napoleon Gary Propper, but in that hot moment she was as driven as her mate, her hand-eye skills came together instantly, and in the 1971 SURFER Photo Annual, Jana is one of only eight people featured on the “About the Photographers” page, along with immortals like LeRoy Grannis, Ron Stoner, and Art Brewer. Larry Pope, himself a hot surf media up-and-comer, called Frye “the best surf photographer on the East Coast.”

I reached out to Pope last week to see if he had any info on Frye, as my Google searches were all going nowhere, and this is what he sent back:

I guess I should know about Jana, we were married for 10 years! Regarding her brief stint as a photog—she was really good. Better than a lot of the shooters from that time. What held her back was the tight rein Gary had on her, which meant she wasn’t able to get out there and explore her talent. Had she gone to the North Shore, where pretty much all the action was at the time, I’m convinced that she would have more than held her own. The strange thing is, I don’t really think Jana was that into photography in the first place. She never showed any interest when we were together [from ’72 to ’81]. But what she did in that short period in ’71 is not to be underestimated.

I hope to revisit Jana Frye at some point, but for now here is the 1971 Greg Loehr off-the-lip shot that made her famous; for my money this was the most radical photo of the year, and below that is a Katin ad from the same year (photo by Larry Pope) featuring Loehr, Frye, and Propper.

Shirley Rogers, like Frye and Severson, also backed her way into surf photography. She moved from Honolulu to the North Shore just out of high school, where she’d taken a photography class or two, and as she relates in this wild-child-gone-AARP interview from last month, she dug her camera out from the back of the closet just to break up the tedium.

I was bored. Back on the North Shore in those days, I’m talking ’70s, there was honestly nothing to do. I mean, nothing. Our job as women was to go to the beach from nine to five. Me and my girlfriends, all the chicks on the North Shore, we’d all go lay on the beach at Waimea. Which was fine, for a while. But there’s only so much gossip and so many People mags you can read before you get really, really bored. So I just started taking my camera down there. And after a while, people were going, “Oh, you got some good shots.”

Again like Frye and Severson, Rogers’ place in surf media was mediated, if not engineered outright, by her relationship to a man—notorious North Shore heavy Eddie Rothman, Rogers’ live-in boyfriend for seven years. Shirley had all the talent in the world, but the surf photography game was both low-paying and lowkey cutthroat, and Rogers’ near-instant move to the first string was helped along (and never talked about) by her relationship to Fast Eddie. Tied into that, of course, was the fact that Rogers was overwhelmingly attractive, slender and glam, a mixed-race female David Bowie, smiling and flirtatious one moment, stone-cold and basilisk-eyed the next, the brightest star on the beach, any beach, anywhere.

Shirley knew it, and used it, and today when she shakes her head about how there were more photos of her in the magazines than by her, there is maybe a touch of regret in her voice, but not really, and last time we talked on the phone she was out the door for catch a flight to JFK to spend New Year’s Eve with Quincy Jones, and check her Instagram, there she is in Times Square wearing some kind of bejeweled cowboy hat, black leggings, puffy white boots and matching jacket. At 71, she is fascinating and exhausting.

Scroll down for a starter pack of Rogers’ photography. Louise Severson and Jana Frye both took surf photos before her, but Shirley is the one who, when the time comes, will be buried with amulets and murals and gold masks in a sealed vault beneath a pyramid.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Matt

Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Gerry Lopez, Uluwatu, photo by Shirley Rogers; Jana Frye; Garry Propper, photo by Frye; John and Louise Severson, 1965; John at Sunset, photo by Louise; Shirley Rogers. Louise on the beach shooting John at Sunset. Jana Frye with camera, photo by Alan Margolis. Greg Loehr, photo by Frye. Loehr, Frye, Propper, in 1971 Katin ad, photo by Larry Pope. Shirley Rogers, photo by Jeff Divine. Hans Hedemann at Backdoor, 1980. Margo Oberg, Lynne Boyer, Jericho Poppler, and Betty Depolito, 1980. Black Shorts, 1978. Peter McCabe, G-land, 1980. Ian Cairns, 1980. Lynne Boyer.]