To Open Eyes

Humans have never had much problem sorting themselves into groups of distinct social status, favoring hierarchy over harmony. Surfers, especially, seem to love self-triage. Certain faces in the crowd at breaks ranging from the most revered spots on the planet to humble sea slop are often fixated on marshaling and maintaining a pecking order. As such, it stands to reason that people who work in surfing—like, say, surf photographers—might also have a less talked about, if no less maintained, hierarchy. 

At the top of the surf-photog pyramid sit the OGs: single-fin film-era grandees with their own hardback coffee-table books. Then there are the alpha swimmers, who make handsome day rates by sitting between the lip and their subject’s rail. Those who’ve garnered fame through the popular vote also inhabit the upper echelons, their position coming via efforts spent curating a following of millions. Then there are all the rest. 

Plumbing the very bottom rungs of the caste system are those eking out a subsistence living, dancing a thin line of meek swash, shooting panting beginners in surf-school Lycra struggling to their feet.  It’s among these less-than-idyllic surroundings, at a German surf camp on France’s southwest coast, that we meet Simon Fitz.  

Born and raised in the Thuringia heartlands in central Germany, Fitz was certainly landlocked, if not unjazzed. He didn’t ride a breaking wave until his mid-twenties, much less shoot a photo of one. “As a kid, I had zero interest in photography,” he explains. “I was drawing a lot. My parents shared a lot of their music and artistic tastes with me, so there was lots of creativity, but no photography.” 

​​While studying to become a schoolteacher (geography and physical education) at Jena University—notable alumni include Carl Zeiss and Karl Marx—he got a hook-up from a local skate shop for a summer job at a surf camp in France. Figuring he’d go spend a few warm months on the coast, he bought a cheap used Sony en route for his new gig as the staff photographer. “I was super into art at that stage, and for the first few weeks,  I thought, Fuck, I hate surfing. I just wanna take pictures.” 

By his own appraisal, he managed to shoot a couple of nice sunsets that summer, but his main output was whitewash warriors, who could buy their pics for 20 euros a pop. Despite the humble nature of the action itself, Fitz saw it as no lesser a training method.  

“Shooting surf schools, you learn pretty fast,” he says. “When I get into something, I like to get obsessed. It becomes all I want to do, all day, every day. So I’d be walking on the sand with a monopod, shooting JPEGs for seven hours. Then, in the evening, I’d edit all the photos, still try to make time for partying with the guests, and then get back at it the next morning. It’s pretty relentless, but the learning curve is steep. Mostly I was just trying to figure out what a technically decent surf photo actually looked like.” 

Meanwhile, his own surfing reconciled, and by snaffling sessions between his duties, he got hooked. Despite the bright and breezy nature of his subjects’ formative stoke, as well as his own serendipitous forays in trim, his muse remained leaden—not an obvious sentimental fit for capturing surf-camp buzz, but perhaps precisely the creative friction to make it interesting. “My mental state at the time—part of the reason I left Germany—was kinda dark,” he says. “I was into moody, melancholic stuff, and those were the kind of photos I wanted to take.” 

In between shooting and editing, he’d fall into deep YouTube holes. “I was always trying to find creative people that inspired me,” he remembers. “Desillusion magazine did an edit with [the late pro skater] Dylan Rieder, and I probably watched it more than 100 times. I liked the fact that it wasn’t technically perfect, but the emotion, music, vibes—I was super interested in all that.”

Further influences outside of surfing also held Fitz’s interest. “I never really looked at surf photography,” he admits. “Even now I almost never do. When everyone is looking at the same kind of images, it’s hard to get your head out of following the convention.” 

Fitz says he’s still never taken a photography course or had any kind of training in the medium. Instead, he cites things like graphic design from the ’60s and ’70s, notably vinyl album covers, as ready fonts of creative juice. 

“Today, we put so much work out every day, whereas back then, they put so much time into the process—partly because they had to cut things out with scissors,” he says. “I love to take my time with images. Sometimes a shot can take 30 seconds to edit on the computer, but it can also take half a day to shoot. I actually love the editing part, playing around with blurry, unsharp images and seeing what results I can get.”

For all the unorthodox nature of Fitz’s initial path into surf photography, some of surfing’s more conventional attractions nevertheless quickly hove into view. Winters in Indonesia and Morocco kept him in a perpetual cycle of waves and light. He started to get a feel for the images he was trying to capture, ever favoring evocation over action. 

“You can’t see colors at all when you start taking photos,” he says. “You eventually develop the feeling for what looks good for your images, but it takes time to get your vision. That was a magical period. I was only shooting for myself. I was going as deep into it as I could, shooting with surfers like Flora Christin Butarbutar, Anaïs Pierquet, and the longboarders around Canggu.”

Visits to the Gliding Barnacles festival in Figueira da Foz, Portugal, provided the opportunity for him to further hone his subject matter. “As far as classic longboarding,” he says, “like single-fins, no leash, I just love that aesthetic.” With an assembled cast of like-minded individuals, deep creative connections soon flourished. “Eurico  Romaguera instantly became one of my favorite surfers. I got the chance to shoot with people like Robin Kegel, who’s such a fascinating character. And there’s also people there like Levi Prairie, who just has a completely different story to most. What I’m really looking for is someone who surfs in a unique or special way. You can’t judge longboarding because everyone surfs completely differently, so it’s not, ‘I like this one better.’ It’s more, ‘I like them differently.’”

Currently splitting his time between France and Portugal, Fitz has continued to build relationships within the log scene, including fruitful collaborations with brands like Rhythm. And if perhaps not quite regressing to the mean of a surf-photography career path, some of his recent exploits certainly have familiar feels within the time-honored tradition of shooter-surfer travails.

“Last winter, we did a trip to Morocco for 10 days and got just one decent session the whole time. Rico got three waves, maybe did three high lines and one turn. That was the entire trip,” he says, laughing. 

Still employed as a photographer for Pure Surf Camps, although no longer shooting surf lessons, Fitz feels he’s in the privileged position of being able to explore creative avenues outside of his day job   without having the commercial pressure of trying to sell photos to pay the bills. This means that instead of responding to an imperative to feature a sticker or product in the frame, the surfer in his images can become almost incidental.

 “I like the quiet, negative space in photos, where the surfer isn’t necessarily the main subject,” he explains. “I love the imperfections. I’m also always asking myself, Does the photo have a meaning? And that only really comes with having the connection with people. The surfers that I shoot with, they’re not really pro surfers in the traditional sense of following a tour or traveling constantly. They’re working other jobs, whether they’re shapers or musicians or whatever, so they’re basically at home and are just surfing when the waves are good. When people are in their element, where they live, I think they have a bit more to express, on the wave or outside of the water.”

At 33 years old, Fitz is still in a relatively new yet intense phase of his immersion in surf culture, but the experience has already given him enough to know what inspires  him. Rather than home in on one aspect of the genre, he’s looking to maintain the creative wiggle room to continue to branch out and diversify. 

“I’m certainly not trying to limit myself by saying I’m only a surf photographer,” he says. “The art that I can do—or whatever you want to call it—is always really just a feeling, and I’m just trying to frame that. There are so many other ways of doing that, whether it’s graphic design or whatever, bringing different creative styles together. There are lots of people I want to meet and learn about. So who knows? Maybe my brain ends up spitting out something other than a surf photo.”

[Feature Image Caption: Eurico Romaguera, Portugal. His whole goal in surfing is to ride big point waves as fast as possible on classic-inspired logs. He doesn’t care  so much about “tricks” or noseriding.  He calls his boards “speed shapes.” Each one is built with this singular goal in mind, by Robin Kegel of Gato Heroi.  The boards have minimal rocker and sharper rails that drive through bottom turns and high lines. They’re usually 9’9″-plus and glassed super heavy. Once they get going, they don’t stop.]