Hidden in Plain Sight

If you zoom in on the southwestern edge of Africa from outer space, you’ll see a peninsula shaped like a crooked smile curling into the South Atlantic Ocean. This is where swells generated off Antarctica finally make landfall after traveling 3,000 miles across open water. The geography of the Cape Peninsula is a fitting end to their journey. Cliff faces collapse abruptly into deep bays. Impenetrable kelp forests cordon off miles of rough granite reef. In winter, the gunmetal water mirrors the storms that roll in off the sea, raw and untamed.

Ant Fox’s house lies wedged into this primordial landscape, located one block back from the beach on a quiet road in the village of Kommetjie. It’s a bright weekday morning. Fox greets me at the gate, then leads the way up a narrow staircase that opens onto a living room where the sea is visible just beyond a dense thicket of milkwood bush. The house, like the rest of Fox’s life, has been built around the light that streams in through the dormer windows and sliding-glass doors  that frame the pitched roof. “You get the sun coming up over there in the morning, and you can track it the whole day until it sets,” says Fox, sweeping his arm across the living room to mimic its arc.

Like most photographers who ply their trade in the brine, Fox was a zealous disciple of surfing first, chasing waves around the Cape Peninsula. He flirted with its kelp-tipped reefs and got hooked on the refined beachbreak peaks of Dunes. But it was a volatile patch of shorebreak that was responsible for thrusting him abruptly into the world of photography. “I was trying to do an alley-oop or something like that at Krons,” he says, pointing toward the wave that lies just beyond the milkwoods. “I came down with my knee on the board and ripped a bunch of ligaments. That was me, out of the water for six months.”

Prior to that, Fox had picked up a secondhand Canon during an extended stint working and traveling abroad and began documenting the places he visited. By his own admission, the photos weren’t much more than travel snaps, and the camera gathered dust once he returned home. “After I injured my knee, I’d just sit on the beach watching the waves, and it started to do my head in. So I dug out my old camera and started taking photos,” he says.

When his knee was fully healed, he found himself opting to shoot photos more often than not. “I wouldn’t say photography replaced surfing for me,” he says. “It was a different challenge. I loved chasing the shot, and I loved riding waves, but once I started shooting from the water, it was game over.” The burgeoning Kommetjie surf scene meant that talent was never in short supply, and Fox quickly built up a reputation shooting for local surf magazines. But Cape Town’s waves and weather are notoriously temperamental. The moments when everything comes together are fleeting. Prizing them out into the open required a dedicated approach.

“You don’t have lots of opportunities to get amazing shots here, especially pulled-back images,” says veteran photographer and fellow Cape Town resident Alan van Gysen. “It’s pretty elemental, and things change quickly. There will be moments—little diamonds in the rough—but you’ve got to be patient and know what you’re looking for, and you’ve got to know how to work with all the imperfections. I think in that way this environment really shaped Ant as a photographer.” 

To wrangle his subject matter, Fox—already disinterested in long lenses—pulled back even farther, shooting primarily with 50-millimeter lenses. With the bulk of surf magazines heavily weighted around close-up action at the time, it could have been viewed as career suicide for an up-and-coming photographer, but that didn’t deter him. “I never identified with that ultra-close-up shot,” he says. “I’ve never even owned a telephoto lens. I think the longest lens I had was a 400 millimeter. I shot with it once or twice and was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s too tight!’ I sold it and never went back.”

The same approach became evident in his water shots. Where most photographers were using fisheye or longer lenses to get within spitting distance of their subject matter, Fox opted to open up the scene, inviting the viewer to see the bigger picture with him. When dark clouds rolled over and other shooters packed away their gear, Fox would be doing the opposite, waiting for that random patch of light to shine through a brooding sky. He’d spend hours crawling around on his belly in the howling wind to get a different angle, teeth gritty with sand, even when there was nobody out surfing. Oftentimes he wouldn’t get a usable frame. But occasionally a shaft of light would strike a plume of spray just right, or beneath a mountain a wave would unfurl with a rider locked inside, and it would all come together, illuminating those moments that lie hidden in plain sight.

These different perspectives of familiar scenes soon came to the attention of Grant “Twiggy” Baker, who was busy plotting a local expedition with good friend Andrew Lange. The duo was on the lookout for an extra wingman who knew how to keep his lips sealed and lens focused. Fox got the call.

Their target was Namaqualand, a remote, wave-rich zone that lies along the west coast of South Africa and stretches more than 300 miles north of Cape Town, all the way across the border into Namibia. The semi-desert landscape is populated by millions of succulent plants and few people, eventually spilling into an ocean that is pockmarked with reefs, points, and beaches.

The trio ended up staying in an abandoned fishing shack within striking distance of a slab Baker had discovered nearby. The rocks in front were packed with black mussels, and a crayfish dinner was always just a dive away. The abundance of the ocean stood in stark contrast to their spartan living conditions. “That trip changed everything,” says Fox. “There were so many waves that we found that I don’t think had ever been surfed before. Some were slabs that were rideable, but other waves were just untouchable, which is hard to believe with Twiggy because he just goes on everything. What really struck me, though, was how wild and remote the region was. We got battered by storms, the tin roof went flying off more than once, and we constantly battled with the shitty little generator we had to run some lights and charge our equipment.”

“It was supposed to be a short trip, but we ended up living in that shack for close on three months,” says Baker. “Ant really captured the essence of the place, how untamed and powerful it was. I think that carries through in his work today. As long as he had his ciggie and strong cup of coffee in the morning before swimming out, he was fired up and good to go. We became partners in crime after that. I still don’t trust any photographer more than him to be in the right place at the right time.”

Fox considers some of those pioneering sessions along the Namaqualand coast the best waves he’s ever documented, including one particular day at an electric-blue beachbreak they found. “Everywhere you looked was just spitting blowouts,” he says. “I just had to walk around and lift up my camera. No matter where you shot from, you would always have this picture-perfect wave in the frame and only Twiggy out.”

Tragically, the wave no longer exists. An opencast mine destroyed the small estuary that feeds sand into the lineup, and mining operations have rendered the beach—and many others like it along that coast—off limits. But the Namaqualand trip laid the blueprint for forays farther into other parts of Africa. The highest-profile of these was a mythical West African sandbar that would eventually go viral when they invited Mick Fanning to surf it, with the ensuing video and photos of “the Snake” lighting up the internet. The campaign was owned by Rip Curl, so Fox’s name never appeared on the images—standard industry protocol—but the photos became the millennial equivalent of Craig Peterson’s shots of Petacalco in the early 1970s that rocked the surfing world to its core and collectively opened our eyes to what was still out there.

One of Fox’s favorite photos from that trip is not one of the timeless, pulled-back shots of an empty lineup or Fanning threading an endless barrel, but of a fisherman dragging his net through the shorebreak. The blue net pings off the washed-out sepia hues of the overcast morning, while the lines of the net effortlessly lead your eye to the wave peeling down the spit. The image is typical of Fox’s trademark perspective, one that makes you feel like you’re not just there in the moment but wading in a few steps behind him, peeking over his shoulder as you take in the scene.

When asked what the most important aspect of a good photo is for him, Fox replies that a good image doesn’t always have to be technically perfect. “But it should make you feel something,” he says. “If it stirs up some kind of emotion, that makes a photo worthwhile.” Van Gysen likens Fox’s considered approach to that of a fine artist more than a photojournalist, which is fitting, considering the bulk of Fox’s work from surf photography nowadays goes to beautifully framed prints. He also has pursued other lines of photography, but, he says, nothing has stuck.

“I’ve tried architectural photography, I’ve tried a bit of wildlife, but nothing keeps me coming back like this,” says Fox, motioning to the broad expanse of sea and sand that lies beyond his home. “I’ve shot Dunes to the absolute death. But you can still come away with something magic if you just fool around with it and try something a little bit different. It’s never the same.”

When I ask if this has led to him applying more of a fine-art approach to his surf photography of late, Fox politely dismisses the notion. “I don’t know if I try to look at it as anything other than what I’ve been trying to do the whole time, which is to portray this environment that we’re in. I’m still doing the basics—maybe just a bit differently than when I started. I just want people to keep feeling something when they look at my work.”

[Feature image: The wind was screaming, and my cameras were pretty much buggered from getting sandblasted while I was lying down to get this angle. The dark sky lit up momentarily with a bit of sun, lighting the low-hanging clouds and whitewater but leaving the mountains in the background ominous. Despite all that was going on, I was lucky to get a nicely composed image of Jordy Smith getting barreled.]