In 2023, my friend Parker and I started saying, “Surf’s up,” at the end of every voice message we sent each other. We send a lot of them, and long ones—sometimes fifteen or twenty minute monologues about how we are and what we’re doing, and sometimes about nothing at all. I don’t remember how we started the surf’s up thing, except that one day one of us said it, and decided from that moment on to always say it. Sometimes when things are not great we end our messages by saying, “Surf’s down,” or if things are hectic we might say, “Surf is wild,” or some other variant while chuckling grimly.
Somewhere in the origin of this habit is the fact that also in 2023, I took several day trips to Virginia Beach to photograph surfing, and some of my friends (including Parker) came to associate surfing with me, even though I have never surfed myself and have no plans to. I started photographing surfing in 2022 because I love the ocean and I liked to photograph skateboarding, and it made sense. My first season on the beach felt like the beginning of a new passion, but that momentum petered out when I returned this year. For one thing, I started too early, driving out to the jetty in the spring before the Mid-Atlantic has seen any waves—those don’t show up around here until late summer or fall. I loved waking up at 3am and making the two hour drive to catch the sunrise glittering across the low waves, but not much action to capture. In August I repeated last year’s journey to ECSC, an annual surf competition held at Virginia Beach. Both years I booked an Airbnb for a four days and woke up before dawn to photograph the competition and the sunrise, but this year felt grueling despite the fact I booked a nicer room, closer to the jetty where the competition took place, and could easily walk to more places than last year. The heat was oppressive and a casual walk down the strip to find lunch wiped me out. My favorite parts of the trip were lying in my air conditioned room, taking a nap. I felt less invested in the surfing, and the photos, the whole reason I’d come, which could have been the weather, or could have been because by August, I was already kind of over it.
I think I took something I had an interest in and tried to do too much of it. Or rather, I did a higher ratio of it than my interest in it allowed. I do like to photograph surfing, and I do like to wake up early and drive to the beach and watch the sunrise, and learn new terms for things I didn’t know anything about before. I just don’t like it enough to do that every month for most of the year, which is what I did in 2023, and wound up with eight million photos of the same surf shot on the same stretch of beach over the same golden/purple/hot pink sunrise backdrop.
In 2024, I am sure I will kill at least one roll of film in that same setting, but if I’m being honest, probably not more than one roll. I think that’s a closer-to-the-truth ratio of action and interest. And now, on this last day of 2023, tired of scrolling through the folder on my iPhone of photos I haven’t posted yet and being affronted with a wall of water and surfers, I am dumping a bunch of them here, to leave them behind once and for all. Parker and I will still say “Surf’s up,” at the end of all of our voice messages, because we like it and we think it’s funny and it’s too late now. And I will still make that 3am drive to catch the sunrise, but I will wait until the season is right and the waves are in fact up, so I can cherish it.
Here are all the shots I do not want to take with me across midnight.
Looking back on these as I posted them here, I concede these are all actually really dope shots. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful. Happy New Year.