The Red Right Hand

“Tack sharp, well composed, well lit, directional, competitive, demanding, contemporary, analytical, meticulous, efficient, and proficient. If you study his vast body of work, you are close to knowing my good friend Larry Moore.” —Bob Hurley

Once upon a time, magazines were at the center of the surfing universe. It didn’t matter if you tried to avoid them or if you memorized every printed word and photo from cover to cover. These monolithic star-making institutions—most notably Surfer and Surfing—inevitably informed our parking-lot conversations and lineup chatter, our travel plans, and our opinions on what riding waves actually meant in the grander scheme of life. 

The power of “The Mag” became especially potent as professional surfing and the surfwear industry grew in lockstep from the mid-’80s to the stratospheric mid-aughts, when publicly owned brands like Quiksilver and Billabong generated revenues approaching $2 billion each, and even young, non-competing pros could make as much as $200,000 a year in sponsorship if they knew how to get their picture taken. 

It’s within this context that we introduce Surfing magazine’s unrivaled photo editor, the late Larry “Flame” Moore. During his tenure from the mid-’70s to his untimely passing in 2005, one could make that case that no individual wielded more influence, broke more ground, created more stars (both in front of and behind the lens), and fueled surfing’s forward trajectory more than Moore. 

Why? Because Moore was more. More intense. More competitive. More driven. More relentless. More insatiable. And more passionate than anyone around him. That passion was contagious. Those in his orbit couldn’t help but rise to meet his sky-high expectations and, ultimately, his approval. 

Flame was such a force during this time that you almost couldn’t imagine a surf-magazine ecosystem without him, as if his sole purpose on the planet was to push the levels of surf photography and high-performance surfing toward new summits. Moore himself said that the job chose him—that the stars intentionally aligned to show him the path to a career where his two passions (surfing and technical mastery) would forever intertwine.

Perhaps they did. 

Moore never intended to become a surf photographer. The calling came to him in the form of a debt repayment from a friend who was on his way to Canada to avoid the draft. Instead of the $100 he owed, he gave Flame—then a 22-year-old avid surfer and half-committed Long Beach State student—a Pentax K1000 SLR with a 400 mm Vivitar lens. This unassuming piece of Japanese machinery became the portal to what would define the rest of Flame’s life and career. 

It started with college buddies like Mike Wilson and Jay Sussman. Both good surfers, they were willing participants in Moore’s fledgling pursuit of the ultimate surf shot. Even in his formative years during the groovy ’70s, when backlit afternoons and Lightning Bolt pintails defined the mood, Moore had a distinct and unwavering take on what constituted a good surf photo: great surfers, great surfing, great light. 

This could have stemmed from his extensive hours in the darkroom. During a time when he was shooting most of his images on black-and-white film, he learned his prints turned out best when the subject was well-lit from the front: white whites, black blacks, and no muddy in-between. As he once said, “The better light I could get on an image, the better they liked it. That will stand the test of time—the sun on your back and on the face of your subject.” 

This rigid aesthetic aligned perfectly with the technicolor ’80s when they arrived. Moore, who’d by then established himself as the Surfing magazine General of Armed Photographers, was now in a perfect position to storm the beaches of rival Surfer and gain unprecedented new territory. 

It started with establishing his first beachhead. What was originally known as Young’s Camp (eventually Salt Creek to the general public) soon became Flame’s Studio to local surfers and photographers alike. The punchy, close-to-shore beachbreak in Dana Point just down the road from Moore’s home became ground zero for the California pro-surfing machine. Starting with Mike Cruickshank as proof of concept—and carrying on through early ’80s titans like Mike Parsons, Dino Andino, and Jeff Booth, then continuing with the Momentum Generation’s Pat O’Connell, Vince De La Peña, Donavon Frankenreiter, and beyond— practically no aspiring Southern California professional broke through without notice from Moore’s omnipresent 600 mm lens. 

There was only one catch: These young pros risked working with other photographers at their own peril—especially if that photographer worked for Surfer, which by this time Flame was calling “The Enemy.” O’Connell experienced the wrath firsthand after returning from a Barbados trip with Kelly Slater and photographer Art Brewer in 1992. “I was excited to tell Larry about it all,” he says, “but the first time I saw him, he drove by and flipped me off!” 

Flame demanded equal loyalty from his deep stable of talented staff photographers: Dan Merkel. Don King. Aaron Chang. Jeff Hornbaker. Chris van Lennep. Jeff Flindt. Hank Foto. Pete Frieden. Peter Taras. DJ Struntz. Pat Stacy. The list of legendary lensmen who credit Flame as their mentor, chief motivator, and coach is endless, and his associates marveled at how he was able to manage so many large but fragile egos at once. The answer? He showed them he cared, he gave them time, he made them better, and he gave them purpose. 

When Flame channeled that collective purpose in harmony, the results were staggering. On a typical mid-’90s morning, after firing off a half-dozen Velvia rolls of unadulterated ripping in prime-time “Larry Light” at “his beach,” he’d march into Surfing’s office on Calle Amanacer at around 7:45 a.m. with an Igloo cooler in hand. On his voicemail: messages from Hornbaker (another Mentawais super session), Chang (next-level Puerto Escondido), Hank (some place called “Kumbaya” in Tahiti), van Lennep (Cooking Cave Rock!), and Flindt (Baja strike mission: success). None of these teams would have been in position if it weren’t for the invisible hand of Flame. And he found a way to masterfully conduct this photo orchestra swell after swell, year after year, decade after decade, with Wagnerian precision. 

Larry rarely left “Central Command.” Not only did he like to stay close to his loving wife, Candace, and his son, Colin, but he also felt more comfortable when he was pulling the strings. That’s not to say he wasn’t obsessed with uncharted territory. Working closely with good friend and Surfline founder Sean Collins, they mapped every potentially un-surfed wave from Southern Baja to the Channel Islands with the intention of pulling the trigger when all the elements came together. As a result of this collaboration, they established Todos Santos as a big-wave proving ground, Isla Natividad as the ultimate summer-afternoon studio, various nameless Channel Islands deepwater spots, and, finally, the crown jewel: Project Neptune. 

Spotted from a plane by Flame and pilot Mike Castillo during the swell responsible for the 1990 Eddie Aikau event, the underwater shoal known as Cortes Bank became the holy grail for big-wave surfing for the next decade. Flame had the top-secret photographic evidence: massive right walls anywhere from 50 to 100 feet rifling over a reef 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. Highly sensitive to outer-water winds and countless other unknowable hazards, the wave presented a logistics challenge that was both expensive and complex. 

But Flame and Collins never gave up on their dream, slowly zeroing in on exactly what they’d need to make it happen. More than 10 years later, on January 19, 2001, that dream became a thing of legend. 

Most are now familiar with the stories surrounding Cortes’ first ascent, but one moment in particular might best summarize Flame and his tireless contribution to surfing. It occurred at exactly 10:36 a.m. that day. 

In the channel, shooting with a 300 mm from his 24-foot World Cat power catamaran: Rob Brown. On a ski, with a 70/200 mm long lens: Aaron Chang. Up and riding: Mike Parsons, on a 66-foot record-breaking behemoth. And, above it all, hovering in Castillo’s Cessna 172RG: Flame, walkie-talkie in one hand, camera in the other, somehow conducting the unconductable.

[Feature Image Caption: Christian Fletcher]