The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
Dan Merkel, the great surf photographer, recently decided he wanted to take photographs of a tree. The palmate maple stands in a Japanese garden in Portland, Oregon. Each year, for just a few days,
all its leaves turn red as the season changes to fall. “It’s the Teahupoo of trees,” he tells me. “I talked to one guy who said he’d made a million dollars shooting that tree.”
Photographers have to book a time and are given two separate angles to shoot. Then they must leave to make way for other photographers. Merkel waited in Oregon for five weeks hoping for the tree to turn. Each week he would call the administrators of the park and be told some version of, “It’s not far off” or
“It’s 80 percent there.”
When the tree did finally turn, he drove two hours to the garden and made sure he was the first person in line to shoot it. Then he stood in line to shoot it a second time. The next day, he came back and shot it again. On the third day, a wind came up and blew half the leaves off the tree.
“It’s just a red tree,” he says. “But I wanted to shoot it.”
*
At 72 years of age, Merkel has outlasted all the surfers he used to so vehemently photograph. “They’re not surfing A-grade anymore,” he says and cackles, “but I’m still taking A-grade photos.” This is just a hint of the almost-mad energy he employed to flip surf cinematography on its head during the modern era’s crucial, mid 1970s turning point. Perhaps his success came because he shares more than just a moment in time with his great subjects. “If I’m not chasing something,” he tells me, “I feel naked and lost, like I’m not doing what I should be doing.”
Merkel was born in Belgium in 1946, the son of a local woman and a U.S. MP stationed in Europe after the war. The family relocated to California when Merkel was still young, settling in the Bay Area and later adding two more sons. In high school, he played football and ran track. Then, on a day trip with his friends to the beach at Bolinas, he saw people surfing.
When his parents took a trip to Southern California, he asked if they would bring him back a surfboard. Having no idea what to get, by pure luck they came home with a Weber. After he graduated in 1964, Merkel began surfing in Santa Cruz, then moved south, to warmer climes.
The only way to beat his opposition was to work harder. “I’ll out-swim Divine, I’ll out-swim Brewer,” Merkel told himself. He trained by running, lifting weights, swimming Waimea Bay—whatever he could do to try to match the energy of the North Shore.
After a stint in the Navy on a ship based out of San Diego, he bumped into a friend who had a Pentax camera. Intrigued, he figured he would start taking photos of his surf buddies, so he bought it and began clicking. Like quite a few of the better surf lensmen, he was a pretty good wave rider—not 4A (in the parlance of the times), but good. He competed up and down the coast as much as he could, shooting as he went. After a chance encounter with Surfing magazine’s publisher, Dick Graham, the mag began to flow him three or four rolls of film for each contest.
In 1970, he made his first trip to Hawaii. Nobody collected him at the airport. Merkel slept in the terminal overnight, then found his way out to the North Shore and discovered his El Dorado.
“I saw the power,” he says.
*
The ace surf photographers of the 1970s were a talented yet cruisey bunch. Like the surfers they shot, they embraced the golden moment of that era in Hawaii, when Lopez was “Mr. Pipeline” and the winters seemed endless. “We were just sitting on the beach,” Art Brewer recalls, “smoking joints and enjoying the time.”
Following his first visit in 1970, Merkel spent the next few winters making his reputation: hardcore, ultra competitive, and a bit eccentric, but nonetheless trained and prepared. Brewer remembers he grew to like him immensely. “He was brilliant,” he says. “He was like a wolf coming into the pack. He didn’t hesitate. He’d fight you if you didn’t wanna get along.”
Merkel’s approach was simple: maximize output. He had a water housing he’d purchased from George Greenough, a thing so outrageously archaic that he could only pull focus with it by manipulating a small piece of wetsuit rubber on the inside of the box to nudge the focus ring. At the time, surf photographers were shooting with film so slow they couldn’t get more than 250th of a second out of it, which meant unintentional speed blurs all over the roll.
The only way for Merkel to beat his opposition and the limitations of the gear was to work harder. “I’ll out-swim [Jeff] Divine, I’ll out-swim Brewer,” he told himself. He trained by running, lifting weights, swimming Waimea Bay—whatever he could do to try to match the energy of the North Shore’s surf.
He was contending with waves that drove the whitewater all the way to the bottom and then exploded back up off the reef, the photographer stuck in the middle like a cork. “Merkel, you’re gonna drown,” Brewer would say to him, both sardonically and honestly.
Merkel didn’t drown. Instead, he shot more photos than anyone. Each winter, Surfing magazine gave him a $500 a month retainer. On that stipend he paid his rent, bought a shitty old rust bucket of a car, shot the film, and was glad for whatever was leftover.
*
Sometime in late 1974, Shaun Tomson was in his car outside the Haleiwa Post Office, reading his mail, when a highly energized character knocked on his window. The character was, of course, Merkel. “You’re the best guy out at Pipe this winter,” he shouted through the glass.
Though he was omnivorous, photographing everyone from Buttons to Bertlemann to Gerry to Rory and onward, Merkel made a special connection that winter with Tomson and his young crew of Australians and South Africans. The relationship was based on mutual respect. They were intent on reinventing the sport. He was as competitive as they were—and as good at what he did.
“They knew I wouldn’t waste their time,” Merkel says. “We’d be out at Sunset, and MR and PT and whomever would go way out to the peak. And I’d tell them, ‘The best shots will be on the inside section.’ And they’d come in there. These guys would takeoff on closeouts and sacrifice themselves to get the shot—whatever it took. You might be a good surfer and known at your local break, but these guys wanted to be famous. All of them. And if you got a cover shot it made you famous.”
They dubbed him “Dan the Man,” aka “Man Mountain Merkel.” “He wanted to make his mark, like us,” Tomson says. “He was hungry and determined and focused. There were all the gods on the North Shore and we were just these skinny guys, and he wanted to be a part of it.”
Tomson was amazed by Merkel’s drive, his fitness, and his fearlessness. “I’d never met anyone so determined to get into the spot, with zero regard for his safety. Closed-out Waimea, he’d just be laughing, throwing his mat away like it was a joke.”
At the same time, Tomson was also astonished by what he refers to as Merkel’s ability to be still. “He could just stop dead,” he says. “You were never scared he was going to put that big camera box into your face, so you could go as close as you wanted. He would become part of the wave, yet not part of it. And I became very aware of what I was doing as a result. The fact that he was so still inside that situation made me think more about my own positioning—my style and approach. It made me a better surfer. It wasn’t just a one-way relationship.”
Shaun Tomson was amazed by Merkel’s drive, his fitness, and his fearlessness. “I’d never met anyone so determined to get into the spot, with zero regard for his safety. Closed-out Waimea, he’d just be laughing, throwing his mat away like it was a joke.”
Merkel’s willingness to commit in the moment resulted in the core sequences of Free Ride, the seminal film that helped launch Tomson and his peers to generational stardom. Prior to production, Merkel was back home at Mussel Shoals when a friend introduced him to the film’s director, and fellow Rincon local, Bill Delaney.
Delaney had seen Merkel’s work and was interested in employing him to shoot footage for the movie. Merkel was interested in Delaney’s ideas about using high-speed Milliken cameras to capture a certain type of shot—something that looked like the photos he and others were beginning to take at Off The Wall and elsewhere, but in motion.
The Milliken weighed around 10 pounds, but in its housing with a battery and a 200-foot film magazine it was closer to 15. It was pin-registered, which meant the film sprockets were held firmly against the inner edge of the lens plate, thus preventing the film from wavering as it pulled past the aperture. Partly because of this, it could shoot 200 frames per second. After developing, if the film was pushed, it looked more like 400.
The crew fitted it with a 10mm lens that simulated wide-angle photography. “The idea was to get in the tube and close with the surfer, eyeball to eyeball,” Merkel says. “There was no viewfinder, it was just point and shoot. The first run, the camera was so heavy it pulled the shot down, cutting off the surfer’s head. I got a few okay ones but a lot of ’em were just too low. After that we changed the angle of the handles on the box so that when I held it, everything tilted slightly upward.”
Released to the world in early 1977, the impact of those shots is hard to gauge through today’s technology. Prior to Free Ride, a Hawaiian surf-movie sequence was comprised of either hazy and distant angles from the water, or full-frontal shots from the beach: Gerry and company drawing their classic lines, half-visible behind the spray or the curtain—silhouettes really—in places only they could go, mysteries beyond our ken, reserved for the gods.
In Merkel’s footage, however, the surfer is both in the barrel and right there, face held in silent concentration, lit from every angle, toes locked into the dirty wax on the deck of the board—a human being in an extraordinary place, with you the viewer inside the mystery, all of it magnified on the big screens of the pre-video surf-movie experience.
Astonishingly, throughout every shot, the horizon—that half-visible yet critical métier of truth in any water image—remains straight and square. Even if you didn’t quite believe what you were seeing, the horizon line moving in and out of frame told you it was real.
*
If Merkel’s Free Ride sequences reinvented surf stardom, they also reinvented his career. In the aftermath of the film, he received the cream jobs: Big Wednesday, and the incredible “Thrillseekers” episode on ABC, which featured Rick Rasmussen and Gregory Harrison at Grajagan.
“We got there and they were shooting this walk-on-the-beach scene. There’s almost no surf and Rick is saying, ‘It’ll be 10 feet tomorrow.’ And I’m thinking, No way! There was no surf forecasting back then. Next day was the best Grajagan I’ve ever seen.” ABC paid for everything, an experience that stunned Merkel more than landing the actual job. He changed film rolls on the beach with a towel over his head as a pseudo-darkroom, a move that freaked out producer Bob Nixon. The show later won Nixon an Emmy.
On Big Wednesday, part of Merkel’s job involved shooting wipeout sequences inside Kammieland shorebreak with Greenough. “We were just shooting people’s arms and legs thrashing around underwater, pretending to hit the reef. I remember the blood packs. [John] Milius really liked blood.”
Merkel became known as the go-to “wave guy.” By 1985 he was shooting film and building stock for sale. At one point, he had 15 separate agencies representing his material. He chased every market he could. If there was a dollar in it, he was on it.
As a child editor at Tracks magazine, I recall cheekily asking him for images, thinking there was no way the great Dan Merkel would stoop to our shitty newsprint and even shittier rates. To my astonishment he piled photos onto us, asking only one thing: payment in advance.
The money stacked up along with the footage. Wealthy and successful, he married an Australian girl and settled into Mussel Shoals, replete with a custom, 16-board Al Merrick quiver. Unfortunately, his life exploded in an acrimonious divorce that stretched out over years and shredded his finances. “Everything was gone,” he says. “House, Mercedes. I even had to buy back my quiver.” To cope, Merkel spent time in Las Vegas and got on the party program. “They knew me in all the clubs,” he says.
He came out of it with one thing of real value: a daughter, now 18, who lives on the East Coast with her mother. He also continued to work hard, buying two more houses and more cars. Then, after a financial advisor took him for a ride, he lost it all again.
His Arriflex 35mm movie camera disappeared into the mouth of that second guzzling beast. It’s not the only thing Merkel has lost over the years. The original Free Ride footage is gone, missing behind a series of stock agency sales and takeovers. A prized shot of Michael Tomson backside in the tube at Pipe nearly disappeared after it was sent to American Cinematographer and wasn’t returned.
Merkel says Surfing also misplaced a lot of his original still material, possibly during various office moves undertaken by the magazine. Merkel reflects that he liked Surfing’s photo editor, the late Larry “Flame” Moore, but that Merkel “coulda been making money off those photos.” When he went back to check on the photo library after Moore’s death, everything had changed. The images were all digital. The crew he visited at the mag informed him, “We don’t know what happened to them—we weren’t working here back then.”
Some of his black and white internegatives were in the fabled stash discovered at an Orange County flea market by Doug Walker. Walker happened on a man selling boxes of developed film, offered him $800 for them, and discovered over 30,000 images from the Surfing archive, including many duplicates. It was theorized that they must have been dumpster-dived from an old office move. Merkel says he would still shoot surfing today if there was any money in it. “How are you supposed to sell it if everybody’s giving it away free?”
Just as the culture of surf imagery has changed, he feels the surfers have changed, too. Merkel recalls MR, Tomson, PT and the rest of Free Ride crew coming into the beach at OTW between surfs, hanging out and talking, then going back out and surfing, then coming in and hanging out again. They wanted to make a living out of professional surfing and would stay in Hawaii for months. There was camaraderie among them, available to all. Now, a lot of pro surfers fly into Hawaii for two weeks, just as long as necessary, and they’re gone. They paddle out for a surf and come in and go straight to their houses, back into their silos.
Today everything Merkel owns is in storage. He spends his days on the road, driving his campervan from image to image, the way an older surfer might move from spot to spot.
As it is, Merkel has become more interested in stock images and oddities that catch his attention: backwash shots, scenic images and landscapes, dramatic large-scale surf. He shoots old style, using manual settings and keeping the frame rate low, perhaps a hangover from the days when you only got 36 shots before you had to reload.
*
Today everything Merkel owns is in storage. He spends his days on the road, driving from image to image, the way an older surfer might move from spot to spot. Both his brothers are still living. One is in Montana, the other in the Bay Area not far from where they all grew up. He doesn’t see them. He sees his daughter occasionally. Other than that, he has no ties.
He sent me a number of shots he’d recently taken on his travels. I was struck by how many of them expressed a sort of dual vision of the world: a shot of Yosemite Valley taken half-underwater in a stream, the submerged valley floor below the waterline, the walls of El Capitan above
and beyond. Another of a pier at sunset, half sky, half-mirrored by a thin skin of water over sand. The red tree in its moment of turning.
Shaun Tomson recalls a similar duality in Merkel the person: “He had the athletic competitive side, but his shots were so artistic, so framed and composed. It’s rare you have those two things together.”
Merkel was in Australia for four months recently, then in Washington and Oregon for six months. He says only death will stop him. “People work all year to spend a week on vacation trying to see things, and that’s what I do all year,” he says. “It’s my life. Why would I wanna quit? My goal is to shoot and see as much as I can.”
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