Feb 13

Feb 13 WATCH: The "Death" of Surf Photography: A Lesson in Three Images

There’s a common complaint about our attention spans in 2024. “It doesn’t exist” being the universal agreement. And even those of us who can remember a time when our phone wasn’t the default go-to for virtually everything, still find ourselves digging in our pocket to satisfy just about any itch — the urgent and ridiculous.

Last week I had a strange thing happen. I was researching for a project at the headquarters for Reef — the brand probably best known for bottle-opener sandals and some pretty, ahem, “memorable” advertising campaigns.

Our research sent us digging through magazines. Piles and stacks of decade after decade of surf photos packaged in a mag format that just felt right. And I will admit, even staring at a stack still took me a while to fully give myself over knowing I had that loaded content weapon in my pocket, but once I did, I was so immersed in the surf photos I had to be torn out of them and told to go home.

Every image had a stillness, a permanence; I was transported to the immortal moment, left to ponder the possibilities, the fear, the excitement, the style, the location, the water, the light, the sky, the wave.

Surf photography has an untapped power currently lost in our contemporary mediums, but I believe they’re waiting to be unlocked again. They’re too powerful. It might be in large format prints, or a magazine that finds the right balance of quality, size and economics to recreate the feeling of a new mag, but something is still there, waiting in the dark room for someone to turn up the aperture and let surf photography reign once again.

This piece almost didn’t happen, but we’re very happy everyone involved helped push it through. Special thanks to Josh Saunders at Red Bull too. It features Grant Ellis, the current photo editor at The Surfers Journal — our only legacy print publication left in the U.S. and one of the good things surf culture has going for it. Grant takes us through three iconic images that define the feeling I’m talking about above. The photos are by Ron Stoner, Tom Servais and Chris Burkard.

The idea for this video piece came at the release of Grant’s book with iconic publisher Rizzoli celebrating 50 years of Surfer Magazine. It’s a beautiful and truly iconic artifact that every surfer should have — even if you’re an ING guy like me or a Transworld guy like Coté.