The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
In April 2018, I was scuba diving off the coast of a remote island in Mexico, photographing manta rays, when I blacked out in about 40 feet of water. I’m still not sure how long I was unconscious, but somehow I managed to keep my regulator in my mouth and thus was able to regain breathing as my body slowly ascended toward the surface. I awoke at a depth of about 10 feet and eventually made my way back to the dive boat, alive but deeply shaken.
By the time I got home to my wife and children in Oregon, I felt as if I’d experienced a kind of rebirth, along with a life-changing shift in perspective. The accident transformed not only my view of the natural world, but also how I wanted to share that vision with others. I realized that almost all of the photographers’ careers I admired were defined by one or two bodies of work. Newly armed with the visceral recognition that our time on this planet is limited, I decided to get serious about documenting and paying homage to the one community closest to my heart: the North Shore of Oahu.
Although I grew up in Colorado, my family owned some land at Mālaekahana Beach, not far from the North Shore, and I’ve traveled there at least once a year every year of my life. I got serious about taking photographs of its waves and residents around 2009, but it wasn’t until I had that diving accident that I chose to make a mission out of it. That’s when North was born.
The day I shot my first portrait for this series of photos, I established the approach I would maintain throughout. I elected to use a 10-by-20-foot portable cloth backdrop to isolate the surfers from their energetic environments. Don’t get me wrong: I love the storytelling that comes with a good environmental portrait, but for this project I didn’t want the viewer to be bouncing back and forth between the subject and the busy location behind them—the palm trees and the ocean and that beautiful light that seems to appear almost hourly in Hawaii.
The goal was to capture moments of stillness while also telling the story of a sport that’s all about motion. I wanted to make pictures that allow you to look into the person’s eyes and study their scars, their musculature, their tattoos, and their gear, and to get a sense of the North Shore experiences that got them to that moment. —Brown W. Cannon III
Excerpted from North. Photographs by Brown W. Cannon III. Stories by Steve Hawk and Bruce Jenkins. Foreword by Mark Healey. Published by Damiani Books. 272 pages.
[Feature Image Caption: Mike Pietsch, outer reef, 2009.]
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