MAKING MYTH
What has surf photography got to do with the evolution of surf culture? Everything. Absolutely everything. Before the rise of video and social media, the pre-digital currency on which the act of riding waves hung was the old-fashioned magazine pic. In those days there was the mainstream, who didn’t quite get it, and surfers, who did. And in-between, there was the Beach Boys.
The cover shot of their 1962 debut album, Surfin’ Safari, features the band at Malibu in a palm-festooned yellow pick-up truck. The image screams with contrived energy – I mean, who goes to the beach in chinos?
The ancient Polynesians, resting on their afterlife alaias, must have laughed at these haoles. So too would the Bronze Age Peruvians, who were the first to glide down peeling points in their reed boats over 3 000 years ago. For like jazz and blues, surfing is a borrowed culture, emulated and adapted from a native way of life. And contrary to popular belief, the Polynesians weren’t the only people to develop surfing.
As historian Kevin Dawson writes: "Popular histories…tell us that the first account of surfing was written in Hawai‘i in 1778, and that Bruce Brown, Robert August, and
