Neptune Alley 

Every surf town has a generation who came of age during the 70s, a group of individuals that define the place in the context of the decade. In this case, that group consists of photographer Jon Foster and his friends, and the town is La Jolla, California. Aside from the details, it could be anywhere. Looking back through photographs, it is the place itself, awash in the zeitgeist of the day that emerges as the one indispensible personality, the friend who brought everybody together. Its streets, garages, crash pads, beaches, surf spots, skate spots, surf shops, parking lots, party spots, motels, bars, liquor stores—memories of people are filtered through the place and the time, and the three become inseparable. Some eras fit certain people and places better than others. Foster’s photographs bear witness to this with humor, intimacy, and a cultivated sense of respect for his subjects. He shot what mattered most to him: his friends, the waves they rode, and the place they called home. 

Foster was a teenager when his family moved to La Jolla in 1966. They lived off La Jolla Scenic Drive, on the Shores (north) side of town. He learned to surf at Scripps pier, and began making photographs in the late 60s. He came on the heels of surf photographers Ron Stoner, Tom Keck, Roy Porello, and Ron Church, who all found La Jolla’s beauty and surf culture worthy of attention. Their images set a very high standard for those who followed. Even Ansel Adams made a series of photographs of La Jolla and Blacks in 1966. One of them shows local surfers Nick Mirandon, Bear Mirandon, and Chris Prowse walking to Blacks from the north side of Scripps Pier across a metallic expanse of shimmering, low tide sand. 

In 1968 Foster’s family moved to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Not a bad time for an American surfer boy to be trolling the beaches of Ipanema. Already familiar with the ways of beachbreak surfing, Foster reveled in the wide-open fun and adventure of surfing Rio in the 60s, shooting photos along the way. His family lived in Rio full time, but Foster returned to La Jolla to finish high school, staying in a room at the Bridgman’s house near La Jolla Shores. Foster had his first photo published in Surfer magazine in 1970, a shot of Arpoador. By 1971, his friend and peer, Shores local Jeff Divine, had officially joined Surfer as a staff photographer, getting his start in La Jolla before moving to the North Shore. 

La Jolla’s surf geography runs from Blacks in the north through the Bird Rock reefs in the south, a distance of several miles. Windansea, Big Rock, and the La Jolla reefs are in the middle. In those days, Windansea surfers held dominion over every reef from North Bird to La Jolla Cove; while on the beaches the Mac Meda Destruction Company ran the show. 

In the 70s, more so than nowadays, each zone had a crew with its own distinct subculture. Blacks guys, Shores guys, Windansea guys, and Bird Rock guys. Some surfers never strayed far from their zone. Others ventured over to the neighboring spots. Foster was among the latter, moving between Blacks, Windansea, and the Shores.

Foster remembers Randy Pidd and Neal Norris as the most impressive Shores surfers in the late 60s. On the Windansea side, he admired stylists David Rullo, Jon Close, and especially Tom Ortner, as well Brew Briggs and Chris O’Rourke, two phenomenally talented Windansea surf rats who were coming up the ranks in the early 70s. Salty blonde, scrappy, and street-smart, Briggs and O’Rourke had style, technical ability, and wave knowledge well beyond their years. They achieved mythic status before their 16th birthdays. Both were steeped in classic Windansea style, but with different approaches. Together they represented the two major style schools prevalent in the early 70s. Brew was old school—he surfed switch-stance with 60s flair and bravado, his style a sort of throwback swansong for a way of surfing that would all but disappear by the end of the decade. Chris was radical, state of the art, supremely stylish. They were often mentioned together—“Chris & Brew”—which seemed appropriate. As a unit they epitomized the best Windansea surfing of the 70s.

The late 60s and early 70s were the golden years of DIY garage board building in San Diego. A mild mannered shopkeeper named Mitch supplied the materials that made it all possible (blanks, resin, catalyst, fins, fin boxes). Faced with considerable resistance from the wholesale board-building industry, Mitch stood firm against the powers that be and gave unprecedented public retail access to a wide selection of blanks, available over the counter at his shop on Pearl Street. It was Mitch who provided the fuel that stoked the fire of the garage board revolution in San Diego. Shapers like Steve Lis and Rusty Preisendorfer have been getting foam from him since they were teenagers.

Jon Foster was another of Mitch’s teenaged customers, building boards with the Bridgman brothers, Paul and Dan, in a garage on Starlight Drive in La Jolla. The Bridgman house was a gathering place for a core local group of progressive Blacks surfers during the early shortboard years, including Terry Hendricks, Bruce Orloff, Henry Hester, and Rusty Priesendorfer. Little micro board labels emerged from the garages: Rusty’s Music Surfboards, the Bridgman’s Atlantis Surfboards, Randy Pidd’s Aquaeous Moments, and Terry Hendrick’s Fluid Systems.

Some of the people in these photographs have passed away, and some of the places have changed or are gone altogether. The deaths of Chris O’Rourke, Butch Van Artsdalen, Kurt Ledterman, and many others left deep scars on the community. They are never forgotten, but life goes on. The Windansea shack has been knocked down by storms and rebuilt twice, but its thatched shade is as sweet and cool as ever. The Shores and Windansea have nice new parking lots, but both still retain a connection to earlier days, their souls intact. 

Nostalgia hits hardest when we think of people, places, and traditions that are gone forever. Most of the beautiful Spanish Colonial style 1920s campus of La Jolla High School, original home of Gregory Peck’s La Jolla Playhouse, and alma mater of Mike Diffenderfer, Pat Curren, Carl Ekstrom, Woody Ekstrom, Butch Van Artsdalen, and Raquel Welch, was leveled in the 70s and replaced with windowless concrete cubes. In the following decades, strict beach regulations would put an end to legendary Mac Meda traditions like the Rough Water Drink and massive Fourth of July beach parties. Cliff jumping off the Clam, a notorious summer hangout near La Jolla Cove, was outlawed. What remains of those 70s days is hidden behind a veil of sanitized regulation, but it can still be found by those who know where, and when, to look.

What happened to 70s surf culture? In La Jolla, as elsewhere, two things seem to rise above all else in terms of change: the rise of modern skateboarding in the middle of the decade, and the birth of professional surfing (and the industry behind it) in 1976. Skating necessarily formed its own culture, and professional surfing and the surf industry necessarily distanced themselves from 70s soul surfing and localism. For better or worse, things have never been the same since. There’s before, and there’s after. From Durban to Dee Why, from Burleigh to Bells, from Honolulu to Haleiwa to Cocoa Beach to Rockaway to Santa Cruz to Santa Monica to San Diego…it doesn’t matter where you’re from, if you surf it’s those two things, born in the 70s, that altered the cultural landscape of surfing to the greatest degree. 

Today the effects of those tectonic shifts have settled down and in some ways come full circle, but in the late 70s everything in surfing was being redefined and in constant flux. Foster free-lanced his way through those transitions, shooting photos of various subjects and working construction. In the 80s he shot windsurfing and snowboarding as they, like skating, emerged from the fringe-status shadows of their parent cultures, claimed their independence, and spawned their own industries and media. In 1988 Foster was hired by Guy Motil and Kevin Kinnear as assistant photo editor for Transworld Snowboarding. By 1989 he became that magazine’s photo editor. Eventually he founded the Snowboard Journal.

These days Foster is back in La Jolla after a 20-year absence. Free of any professional editorial obligations, he takes photos of whatever and whomever he pleases. Foster describes his life today by quoting the late Bill Cunningham, legendary street fashion photographer for The New York Times: “You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.” He spends a lot of time hanging with Buz Sipes, a longtime comrade. A local gallery recently did a show of Foster’s and Sipe’s old photographs, titled “Friends.” The opening of the exhibition was packed. The images on the gallery wall could easily provide years worth of trend forecasting, look book, and ad campaign fodder for today’s fashionista lifestyle brands. People have a powerful yearning for those bygone days. They hunger for precious glimpses of that lost era, like those captured on film by Foster and Sipes. 

Still, some things remain the same. Mitch’s Surf Shop is still in its original location, just a few doors down from the gallery. Mitch is still there, behind the counter, quietly overseeing the day’s commerce. Down at Windansea on a good south swell, you’ll probably see one of Foster’s favorite 70s surf subjects, Tom Ortner, slicing through the pack with style and class, as dignified, respected, and relevant now as he was then. As Foster puts it, “There’s a way he rides that sums up the whole place for me. His approach, his low, speed turns from the side of the peak into the bowl. There are others, but Ortner’s style, skill, and strangeness matches Windansea’s beauty and quirkiness. I could talk a whole Windansea story on one photo of Ortner alone.”`

[Feature image: Santa Ana winds, clean groundswell, and illegal parking, just because. Late afternoon, Windansea, 1974. “Brud McGowan was usually the one that would suggest ideas like this,” says Foster. “There was surf, it was a beautiful day, it was fun. No police showed up. No one was arrested.”]