The Strange Art Of Composure

As soon as I sold my 5’10” Patterson to purchase a 9’6″ Weber Stylist, I became familiar with Chris Klopf’s work. I was 17, the season summer, and in an attempt to impress a girl who had a thing for noseriding, I found myself doing everything to understand that archaic medium, which at first glance appeared so easy and novel, though in application proved to be a searing spotlight on the awkward body I had inherited a year earlier. 

Limbs like ruthless family enterprise, I struggled to master and exploit. It was a summer of tripping, board loss, and humiliation. In the fall, the summer girl, like all summer girls, went away to college, and I was left with a value-size kit of Solarez. Sitting in the front yard, stretching Saran wrap over the cosmetic fractures dolled to the Weber, I imagined that the hardening Q-cell was also fortifying my injured heart.

 I had nine months before she would come home—three-fourths of a year to master the Weber and the strange art of going straight. As the days became shorter, the Southern Californian points became longer. She was stuck in class, and I had all the time and advantage to acquire the necessary skills to strike her with infatuation upon our next encounter. 

I bought up all of the relevant cinema to supplement my pursuit. I also appropriated my uncle’s comprehensive stash of Longboarder magazines. Though I dared not pronounce it, I found Klopf’s consonant-heavy name (a pseudonym, I was convinced) tagged in the bottom corner of many of the images I most scrutinized. His photos contained clear, exacting studies in a surfer’s anatomy, centerline, gesture, and distribution of weight. I tacked these extracted prints to the wall beside a maritime-themed sonnet, which I planned to send to the summer girl. 

“All photographs of surfing and nature are moments in time, never again to be exactly repeated, each image becoming a small piece of history.”

Coming late to this “other” kind of surfing, I inhabited the peripheral. Sitting away from the main pack, I used water time to observe and apply. Trading in the high-performance San Clemente town spots, I headed to the Boneyard inside of the Dana Point Harbor, Church, and The Point at San Onofre with devout fidelity. To both my joy and, in certain nerve-racking, knee-buckling instances of commingling, I came to find that my local spots were also the preferred setups of a majority of the subjects framed in Klopf’s work. 

Tyler Warren, Robin Kegel, Alex Knost, Justin Adams, and even at that extremely early phase in his expression, Andy Nieblas. Any day that the coast was shredded by northwest wind, these characters could be found giving master classes in the protected cove at Church. More often than not, a photographer was also there, fused to the tripod, waltzing the tideline like a great aluminum egret. My imagination automatically inscribed the appropriate pseudonym. 

Slowly, as I began to feel what I was observing, the archaic became contemporary. At the same time, my initial purpose for taking up the longboard gathered dust. The summer girl was no longer my focus, rather an artifact one refers to when mapping such serendipitous shifts in personal ideology. When she came home for Christmas, I was on a road trip, longboarding Rincon. Damaged by two weeks of matinal dew, its ink bled and dried again, the note she left taped to my bedroom window hardly made a crease in the substance of my newfound obsession. 

I was driven further up the points by a desire to experience the sensations that existed beyond the wide-point of the Weber.  Edging into the frame, I eventually fell into rotation. 

As you turn the pages, you will see surfers who have played very important roles in my life—who have, over time, acted sequentially as distraction to adolescent loss, heroes of physical expression in nature, a few of them even becoming dear friends. Eventually flipping the roles, they have played witness to precarious moments in my life, in and around the water. 

I would not have expected that Klopf, who started surfing and shooting at age 15 in 1965 on the Central Coast of California, could have ever imagined his work would play such an integral role in the life of an individual. However, his declaration on the purpose of his photography reveals that his intention behind the lens is not exclusively limited to visual aesthetics. Klopf, which as it turns out is a real name, is a historian just as much as he is an artist. 

“To me,” he says, “all photographs of surfing and nature are moments in time, never again to be exactly repeated, each image becoming a small piece of history. The best photos are a unique harmony of reflexes, composition, lighting, and sometimes just pure luck. For just a fraction of a second, everything’s perfect. A seasoned photographer and his camera’s mission is to bottle and preserve these rare glances for our viewing pleasure.”

Though academia and institution has, at times, led me to dismiss surf photography as simply childish and vain, I return to it constantly to find solace. As a person who often wonders, to neurotic extremes, what exactly man’s role on this planet might be, I can’t help but look at the photographs in Klopf’s portfolio and think that surfing, at least, serves as a binding property between otherwise incongruent, impossible, fleeting moments—a plot in the anti-narrative of everything.