Serenity and Energy
energy.
The whole surf-art angle has honestly been battered down a bit. It’s in this clichéd corner now. But it’s not just about a guy being rootsy and cool, like what’s popular now. I think the whole story of a person is interesting. A guy like Flea Virostkowho did drugs and went to rehab and started a family and climbed to another place: that’s an interesting story to me. These stories with more
background have depth. Not that the stories of people who are ‘soul surfers’ are doing the wrong thing, but the documenting of their backgrounds is usually lacking. There’s not enough of a told story on what made these people go there. There are so many characteristics and depths of stories and places in surfing.
Serenity. Surfing is now about the stuff that’s the most obvious. I f ound m y s e l f r u n n i n g u p a gains t s o m e w a l l s professionally when I was expected to cover all the ripping superstars with the logos in the right places, which I was admittedly after at first. But the m ore I w or k e d, the more I realized the aspects of the surfing world that were more interesting to me than
the commercial side – the misfits and the outcasts and the weirdos and the eccentrics, in a way, have been keeping the ball rolling for me artistically. Figures like Shawn Barney Barron were big for me. It wasn’t a departure, necessarily, but it was how I always looked at things. There were stories in the surfing world that were reality for me and there were subjects who I wanted to follow.
When I started taking photos when I was 13 or 14, I had a little 3-mm SLR camera. My dad is also a photographer, and he told me, “Before you start shooting in color, you have to learn how to shoot in black and white, and develop your own film and make your own prints. That’s the way to get to color.” It’s a real spartan way to learn about composition. Later on, I continued with color photography, and I use both now.