I called John Hook at the end of May. Into my inbox had come a series of night photos he’d shot from the dark, silky waters of Waikiki. Oh the heart yearned. His images took me back to a little stretch of Town. Not Queens or Waikiki proper—but the Rockpiles and Bowls reefs to the west. For several years I’d made an evening ritual of these two breaks. Being terribly introverted, I relished the dusk hours as the city slid into darkness and the waves shed their crowds.
Hook, in a far more social and healthy way, also sought joy in the night. Years before discovering the camera, and throughout high school, he would paddle out after dark with friends—in part to avoid the crowd at Queens, but mostly to have a good time. “[During those early sessions] I remember catching a wave and thinking I was ripping,” he says while laughing. “In the dark I thought the wave was bigger than it was, my spray bigger, the inside bowl more critical.”
It’s probably obvious, but the vast majority of surfers do not make a habit of night surfing. Deprived of sight and an ability to plan well for incoming sets, the experience can be straight-up foolish. You time your takeoff, but seconds earlier than you expect, the wave throws and rolls you. The entire thing can be a shitshow…until it’s not. “Catching a good wave at night is hard to explain,” Hook says. “[It is so different] that I can pretend I’m flying in space, riding this swell of dark-black energy toward a thousand lights all reflecting up the face of the wave.”
Since becoming a professional photographer, Hook’s night sessions have become a way to experiment with technique while capturing memories with friends. This seems to be his arc. “I got into photography as a way to document,” he says. “[Before smart phones], if I wanted to take a picture of the boys hanging out in the parking lot, skating, and listening to the new Unwritten Law CD, I’d have to use my film camera. After that, I realized cameras can do some cool shit.”
Hook goes on about long and double exposures, freezing images, flashes, speed blurs, types of film, using multiple remote triggers, and all the setups they’ve tried at night. He also talks about the early days of sketching ideas and trying to turn them into photographs. “I only got a [water] housing because I had an idea to do long exposures underwater. It wasn’t really to shoot surfers.”
Hook’s night photos come from Queens and Canoes, where Waikiki bends and the easterly trade winds turn directly offshore. Queens, of all of Town’s breaks, sits especially within a protected amphitheater formed by Leahi and decades of dense development. The closer to Queens you paddle, the more Town surrounds you. Hook’s images pair these two worlds. In the background: an array of lights, windows, transactions, and the great tourist horde. In the foreground: a black ocean emptied of its masses save for these few, nighttime sliders. The context and contrast can’t be escaped. “Walking through Waikiki you pass so many tourists on the way to the water,” Hook says, “you feel like a wild animal among a bunch of gawkers.”
Slipping into the ocean and away from humanity will always bring a certain anonymity, while the night will always bring ambiguity. In Hook’s photos, surfers, waves, and Town lose their clarity. What remains is formal and suggestive. In the fading glow, we’re left with a highlining silhouette gliding through a smear of hotel lights. Waves are less seen than implied by countless reflections bending across the water. Hunched on a log or standing on some obscured plank, surfers soar through a primordial black. “The hotels and city give you just enough glow that the surfing can be photographed,” he says.
Who and what we’re looking at can be unclear at times. When—in what decade, what century—is known but not prescribed. Looking at these images, I find myself dreaming. While Hook pretends to fly through space amid the stars, I pretend these surfers ride the alaia of long ago. In the background, I can pretend that the lights of Kapiolani Park are torches lining the old kalo fields. I wonder how these photos might be interpreted eons from now. What meaning might their distant discoverers dream?
Photos of surfing perform this dual purpose—of documentation and myth-making. We bear witness and then we dream. For me, a certain purple in the late-dusk sky takes me, again, to summer in Town. Suddenly, Mount Ka‘ala rests big over Waianae to the west. The reef below is nearly dead and cannot be seen, but its presence weighs heavy. At sundown the tourist cameras begin to flash along the rock piles and the last sailboats tack slowly through the channel. Paddling back toward land, Friday’s fireworks shower down to cheers from the parking lot.
Hook’s images capture the energy and variety that comes with Town at night. Surfers and spray frozen. Boozy lights streak across from within, glowing beneath the water. Some images are manic, some solemn, some sublime. Each one feels like kicking over a rock or turning down an alley to find a writhing ecosystem you never knew existed. Oh so this is what happens over here?
All this life is essential to how Town’s waves, maybe surf spots in general, feel like neighborhoods with distinct personalities. My own surfer’s atlas—the way I understand the ocean and its waves—is not a static definition but a personal map of sentiments, intuitions, and memories. In crowds, and as communities, we form this map and give waves their particular character.
I ask Hook about shooting and surfing in Honolulu, what he notices from the water, how he understands the city. “Town is so funny,” he says. “Ala Moana Bowls guys don’t usually surf Kaisers. Queens guys don’t usually surf Three’s. Somehow the Diamond Head guys don’t consider themselves ‘Townies.’”
Waves that break just yards away can feel like another universe. Even more so, as it turns out, under cover of darkness.
