Nolan Hall comes in through the restaurant bar’s archway, tall and unassuming, polite and friendly, quiet but up for an afternoon drink. He doesn’t give off the eccentric, hipster persona that many of his contemporaries might conjure. Instead he wears plain sneakers, a baseball cap, a blank t-shirt, and a flannel with chino pants. We sit down inside the Mexican joint, tucked into the corner of a slick and neatly-stuccoed strip mall of retail shops in Huntington Beach.
There’s a bank, a donut shop, a sporting goods outlet, a market, and a pet store—a metropolis of commerce and parking stalls for the few remaining consumers who actually venture outside to purchase things, where no amount of cosmetic improvements can hide the stark reality of the decaying, brick-and-mortar retail experience in the face of digital transaction. It’s sad and made sadder by attempts to mask its slow demise with discount offerings and neon signs.
No matter. We’re hidden in a crook, safe inside a cantina where the booths are dark and lit by faux candlelight, an everlasting residue of sticky margarita salt on the Naugahyde. We have a greasy basket of chips and Mexican beer. Notwithstanding the state of shopping outside, this place quietly carries on about its business as it has since it opened in 1969.
Hall left work early this afternoon and came straight here from the Vans headquarters in Costa Mesa, where he’s the global surf team manager. It’s mostly a nine-to-five, but it’s one that sees him on the road constantly. Despite his casual demeanor, he’s a character deeply embedded with some of surfing’s most eccentric and influential squads—a photographer, a musician, an artist, a zine-maker, and a thorough creative. “I can’t believe I’ve never been here,” he says in our booth. “I would never expect it to exist in this shopping center.”
I tell him how I’ve long used this restaurant as a sanctuary from outside influence, a place for both celebrations and quiet reflections, as perfect for festive toasts as it is for clandestine discussions thanks to its tendency to block out the realities of the human condition going on just outside. We begin to discuss his modus and his current inspirations.
Hall is a 33-year-old millennial with a seasoned soul and a modern eye in a world gone almost entirely viral. His early photographs documented the budding careers of Alex Knost, Chris Del Moro, Robbie Kegel, and Tyler Warren in the same unobtrusive manner with which he operates today: a fly on the wall, but a fly you never think to swat. He’s the type of character you enjoy running into around the world—at a party, in the lineup, or midday in a dark bar—which is why he’s able to capture such brilliant imagery. He puts viewers in places they’re probably not supposed to be. Whether it’s backstage, in a van, at the team house, it’s offbeat and in-between.
“He’s very good at reading the vibe and situation, and grabbing moments within that atmosphere,” says surfer Tanner Gudauskas. “I remember he and I stayed with a family of local security guards on the North Shore for a few seasons. They were a raw, no bullshit crew, and we were these haole guys living at their house. After two years of staying with them, we all became good friends and one year we had this huge Super Bowl party. They brought two televisions into the front yard, rolled up with homemade huli huli chicken, and we blew it out. Nolan grabbed a photo of everyone there that day and the shots are such a beautiful representation of them as a group and a family. But it was also one of those moments where I wasn’t sure if they’d say yes to having their photos taken. Nolan can be true to himself in those situations, and make them no big deal. He makes others feel comfortable being who they are, which is how he’s able to get these kinds of images.”
Hall and his early crew from San Clemente and the surrounding regions—adolescents brought together by their parents’ memberships to the beach clubs of San Onofre, Doheny, and Blackies—were all products of the line-in-the-sand period that longboarding went through in the mid-to-late 90s, a time when traditionally-influenced surfing surpassed, and all but extinguished, the modern high-performance longboard lip bashes made de rigueur earlier in the decade. His was a generation captivated by the work of filmmaker Thomas Campbell, taking cues from the surfing of Joel Tudor, Devon Howard, and Mitch Abshere.
“Honestly, it was all inspired by The Seedling,” Hall tells me of his gromhood. “My whole crew kind of came together around it. That was 1999 and I would have been 14. It was a series of events from there. I got my license, and I was overcome with a new sense of freedom that I attached to having a car and a camera. I loved those in-between moments, off with your friends skating a ditch or getting into things when you weren’t in the water.”
Hall’s photojournalism style is known and acclaimed for adding feeling and depth to the mundane, earmarking timeless instances and capturing people at their most vulnerable and contemplative moments. A lot of it is also informed by just capturing transitory human raucous. “I remember having a conversation with former pro skater and artist Ed Templeton in his darkroom once,” he recalls. “He was telling me how he realized that he was super privileged in his situation. He was being sent all over the earth, going to different countries with interesting people, and was in a position to document it. That resonated with me because you can be in so many situations where you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here, I already have photos of this place, or of this person.’ Then you have to snap out of it, and realize that this is a new year, new things are happening, these are still important moments.”
After graduating high school, Hall enrolled at Saddleback Community College. His parents offered to foot the bill for basic expenses as long as he was attending classes. “My dad also gave me his old Nikon camera,” he says, “and told me to make sure the needle is in the middle, and that was that. I signed up for general education courses. But I distinctly remember one day Alex Knost and I were surfing Sano and I had a math class after at Saddleback. Since he had to go back to Newport anyway, he was like, ‘I’ll go with you. I wanna see college.’ I was already pretty late and I opened the door to a full lecture hall staring back. Instead of going in we just closed the door, and I never
went back to that class.”
After his first semester, Hall’s interpretations of higher education shifted. “I just signed up for all the stuff I was interested in from there on out, whether it counted toward something or it didn’t matter. I took photography, screen printing, print making, graphic design—all the stuff that appealed to me.”
Influenced by his passions, as well as an introduction to Pat Tenore’s (at the time) fledgling new brand RVCA, opportunities began to appear. “Alex had started riding for RVCA and I would pretty much hang with him and walk around the offices. I remember going upstairs and seeing the designers working and playing music, and I was like, ‘Whoah, this is cool.’ Then I ended up helping with some projects, helped with sample sales, and painted the ANP [Artist Network Program] room…anything I could do. I was trying to be around that environment. On any given day Ed Templeton, or Chris Johanson, or another artist would come through. Since I was around, and since I’m sure I was chirping about my interest in all of it, I ended up with an internship.”
That opportunity led to his placement within a network of artists that have all played a role in his development. He ended up in a band, The Japanese Motors, with Knost and fellow RVCA employee Andrew Atkinson, which got as far as signing a deal with VICE Records. He then befriended the man who inspired most of his early work, Thomas Campbell. “I remember asking him a million questions, just rattling them off, like, ‘What kind of camera should I get? How do you do this or that?’ And he would just ask me back, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I remember at the time being so frustrated by that. I wanted him to just tell me what to buy, but now I fully understand what he was doing.”
Today, in addition to his day job and his photographic work, Hall is also a member of a collective of zine makers known as Deadbeat Club, founded by Clint Woodside, which features a number of artists and photographers including Ed and Deanna Templeton, Devin Briggs, and Grant Hatfield. The operation publishes books and other print media, and orchestrates group shows and galleries—essentially a break-even economic model built to encourage and showcase the group’s art and photography work. And while the nucleus is built around a punk rock DIY ethos more than a surfing or skating influence, it’s Hall who’s helped blur the lines.
“It isn’t like Nolan is taking epic photos of someone getting tubed or some crazy shit like that,” says Woodside. “He’s photographing his day-to-day life, and it just so happens that in his day-to-day life he is surrounded by some of the best surfers in the world. It gives you this inside view, like a modern [LeRoy] Grannis kind of vibe. There isn’t necessarily this crazy fucking, gnarly shit happening but it’s like, ‘Here’s what life looks like for the people who are part of this culture.’ It’s a great documentation of Southern California, and what people are doing.”
This blue-collar appreciation for the DIY aesthetic in independent publishing seems a natural byproduct of Hall’s art-first upbringing. “My mom is a painter and my dad hung wallpaper and bartended,” he says. “My parents both worked for themselves. At some point, my mom made the conscious decision that she was going to go for it as an artist. She was part of the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach for 20 years. My dad would build out her booth and she’d hang her stuff. Every summer my family would spend time there. And she always had a studio set up. She would always nurture all of our artistic pursuits and always had art supplies at the house, which was a huge thing for me.”
Photography used to possess its own filter, by virtue of its process. In the past, most people couldn’t just pick up a camera and create resonant work without training. The technical side was a barrier that only a photographer who was focused on craft could push through. “Understanding the chemistry, physics, and the process of printing photos, all of that was important,” Hall says. “Then technology came in and advanced the digital camera to a place that leveled the playing field. You can learn photography by buying a new 5D camera. You can literally buy one and just by owning it you will pick up on how to use it.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean an immediate understanding of how to make an image, however, or how to effectively capture a moment. Hall creates powerful images by his use of subject, science, technique, and his own eye to immortalize a frame you might not have noticed, even if you were there. He resuscitates passing moments in time, which is itself a lost art in the digital world.
It’s nearing 5 p.m. when we emerge from the bar’s archway into the waning evening light and the restaurant is beginning to bustle with Friday afternoon revelers thirsty for margaritas and conversation, happy to close off the outside world for a few hours. We walk to our cars as most of the shops in the parking lot close their doors for the weekend and, in this changing world of commerce and transaction, one day possibly forever. Outside the Mexican place, a long line of people wait to get a table. Like in Hall’s work, I’m reminded that certain shared places and moments never go out of style.
[Feature image: Alex Knost and Ellis Ericson, surf check at Newport Point, 2012. Alex has gone through a bunch of different vans over the years. He spends so much time on the road that he runs through them pretty fast]
