Portfolio: John Barton

Shoot the Guests

A surfed-out hush has fallen over the Pitstop Hill resort after sundown, and Johnny Jungle—né John Barton—slumps into his chair, completely fried from more than five hours shooting the best swell of the season so far in the Mentawais. Barton, a 44-year-old Australian originally from Perth, is now in his 14th consecutive season as the resort’s staff photographer. Along with that comes impossibly high standards for surf quality. 

“It was solid double-overhead freight train barrels and clear blue water today,” Barton says, recounting the conditions at Kandui and E-Bay. “I feel bad saying this, because for a lot of people it would be the session of their life, but there was really nothing that inspiring about it. I’ve seen it so many times now.”

As his nickname would suggest, Mr. Jungle is more captivated by the Mentawais’ untamed and overgrown elements than the glossy charter-boat conception that’s wedged itself into surfing’s collective consciousness. Nyang Nyang, the tiny, snake-infested island where the resort is located, is home to coconut farms and villages with a local population hovering somewhere around a hundred people, max. Most of the resort staff (and laborers on the farms) commute in from larger surrounding islands. It’s not uncommon for cell service and Wi-Fi to get knocked out for days by a passing storm front, and when we spoke the resort had just come back online after lightning struck the island, the ensuing god-clap startling everyone awake in the middle of the night. 

More pervasive dangers come in the form of consistent ground invasion by the island’s reptilian population. For years, a black cobra was known to terrorize guests and staff, taking residence on the 92-step stairway that ascends from the beach and up the steep hill that gives the resort its name. “You learn not to walk anywhere without a flashlight at night,” Barton says. He recalls one instance in which the resort owner’s spouse was bitten by a viper while picking flowers to decorate the guests’ dining tables, barely surviving a harrowing overnight crossing to Padang for medical attention in time to avoid having her hand amputated, and another instance the year before, when a venomous snake had wedged itself halfway under a bedroom door in the middle of the night. 

Samuel L. Jackson be damned, no one seems tired of these motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ island. The resort consistently books out a year in advance, mostly with repeat guests and hardly any marketing. “There are a lot of things you just don’t think about until you’ve lived out here,” Barton says with a bemused grin. “The jungle eats your stuff.” 

Sometimes when the jungle eats, it also teaches. Barton credits one such experience—having his long lens destroyed by the tropical humidity—with pushing his photography toward the wide-angle lineup shots that have become a trademark of his portfolio. 

It was April 2011, Barton’s first year as a staff photographer, and an early season swell was flexing through the Mentawais. As soon as he and his guests had pulled into the bay at Rifles—one of the area’s premier right-handers—a big set appeared on the horizon. “There were boats everywhere, and then, all of a sudden, this set starts thundering down the reef,” Barton says. “A lot of long waves like Rifles are hard to shoot from the end of the reef because you can’t see too far out. So boat drivers really push the limits driving in for better photos. This one guy wasn’t paying attention and got caught completely out of position while he was lighting a cigarette. Everyone in the bay started screaming. His boat was facing completely the wrong way after sneaking in to get a good angle of a surfer in the barrel.”

Barton had a perfect view to photograph the mayhem. The boat barely circled around in time, but its engine cut out after landing over the first wave of the set. The boat driver yanked the outboard back to life and narrowly avoided the waves that followed. With Barton’s long lens out of commission, he was the only photographer shooting at enough of a remove to capture a full view of the events. “Everyone else was zoomed in, trying to get a photo of someone in the barrel,” he says. 

One of Barton’s images from that day ran as his first full magazine spread, in Australia’s Surfing Life, and a slew of other publications picked it up thereafter. “Before that, I used to shoot tightly cropped action with a long lens because I thought that’s what you needed to do with surfing,” he says. “That experience was really good for me because it was the first time when I realized, ‘Oh no, this is the perspective I want.’”

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Barton had a fairly pedestrian surfing life in Western Australia until the jungle called. In Perth, he came up learning to ride waves at the city beach, where a jetty formed the prevailing junky windswell into shape. In that now-bygone era of surf culture, the grom abuse that Barton endured to earn a few waves off the older surfers makes the offenses described in some multipart Netflix exposés look mild-mannered and civil. Barton recalls older surfers routinely stuffing the uninitiated kids into wood-slatted storage bins used by the city before gathering around to piss through the cracks.

By the end of his twenties, Barton had successfully climbed the corporate ladder. He was working at a boutique ad agency in Perth when he decided to visit his high school friend Paul Clark, who’d founded the Pitstop Hill resort three years earlier. At the time, there were just a handful of land camps set up, and it was still fairly easy to score empty waves. “It was my first trip to the Mentawais. I visited in the super-late season, and there was no one around,” Barton says. “I think we surfed four days straight before we saw another boat, and it was as beautiful as it gets. By the end of that week, I remember thinking, ‘I have to find a way to live here.’” 

As luck would have it, toward the end of the trip Clark raised the possibility of hiring Barton as a staff photographer. (In Clark’s recollection, Barton had dropped him some not-so-subtle hints that he was interested.) But as soon as the opportunity presented itself concretely, Barton got cold feet. “I’d worked so hard to get to my position in advertising,” he says. “I told Paul I had to think about it. The first day back to the office after I went home, I remember sitting at my desk, and I realized that I’d be kicking myself when I was older if I didn’t try to go after it.” 

Barton already had a reputation among coworkers for tropical daydreaming, and the sudden move permanently etched his nickname. “People at the agency used to call me Johnny Holiday because I was usually planning a surf trip somewhere. Then it became Johnny Whatever: Johnny in Love, Johnny Tired, Johnny Hungover. They started calling me Johnny Coconut when I decided to move out here, and then that became Johnny Jungle.”

When the tropical daydream met reality, Barton piled into a cramped three-bedroom tin-roofed shack that the resort used at the time to house all 14 staffers—three other Westerners and the rest locals, who helped Barton become conversational in the mix of regional and national bahasa they spoke. 

Barton found his work schedule just as intense as the cultural immersion. “You only get a half day off every 10 days,” he says. “I usually try to use that time to surf, because it’s the one day I can go guilt-free without having to worry about missing photos of guests. There are sacrifices you have to make to be out here. It’s really hard to maintain any kind of relationship, and you’re away from your family.”

Clark, the founder and operator of the resort, says that Barton’s value goes beyond his skills with photography or helping guests score waves. It’s also his ability to respond to the unexpected. He describes one instance when Barton aided in rescuing Clark from a multi-wave hold-down at Kandui after he’d dislocated his shoulder. “John is a bit of a Pied Piper,” Clark says. “He’s always revving people for an adventure, like a hike through the jungle to the other side of the island or taking a bunch of guests to bodysurf a nearby shorebreak so he can take water shots of them falling out of the lip. People get caught up in his enthusiasm for the islands.” 

Clark also notes Barton’s nearly unparalleled work ethic as a photographer. “Some years back, John decided to keep a log book of how many hours he swam with his camera throughout the whole season as an added motivator to be in the water rather than capturing the easier angles. Years later, he could probably tell you off the top of his head exactly how many hours he swam that season. John and his water housing have been right there under the rail or hanging out of the lip on some of the most memorable waves I’ve ever ridden, so I definitely appreciate that positioning element of his water photography, on a selfish note. The colors he finds are mesmerizing but, at the same time, very true to reality.”

With consistently perfect conditions and a surplus of pros cycling through—including Josh Kerr, Matt Wilkinson, Harry Bryant, and Koa Smith—it took Barton only a few seasons to capture the hallmark images that have given the Mentawais their reputation. Reaching that point pushed Barton’s photography in new directions. 

“I got so desensitized to shooting the same stuff, where everything was blue and bright like the photos I saw in magazines growing up,” he says. “After a while, I’d climbed every tree, swam every spot, walked every corner of the beach, and covered all the angles. I had to start paying more attention to the things that still stopped me in my tracks: dark storm clouds and smoke drifting across the lineup—things that convey the scenery and the feeling of being here.”

The enforced discipline that comes with working as a staff photographer has helped Barton capture less-predictable moments as well. “There’s a good part of my portfolio that comes from taking my camera somewhere I wouldn’t have if I was on my own,” he says. “Then, all of a sudden, a storm moves in and the lighting does something unexpected and crazy.”

Barton also began expanding his portfolio by chasing swells to Maverick’s and Todos Santos during Indonesia’s off-season, as well as picking up commercial work for brands including Corona, Equinox, Vuori, and Wilson. While traveling in California, he met his now-wife. In recent years, with the addition of their daughter to the family, Barton has pared down his time in the Mentawais to part of the resort’s peak season.

“My wife used to give me some flack and say, ‘Why do you always go to the Ments? There are so many beautiful spots on earth,’” says Barton, who’s lived on two continents and traveled through Central America, New Zealand, and Mexico for surf but finds the allure of the Mentawais unshakeable. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the Mentawais be my muse. I love it so much, and it’s something that I really can’t explain. I just hope that I can keep coming back every year for the rest of my life and eventually bring my daughter here to show her what inspires me.”

[Feature image: Nipussi, Mentawais. I have an obsession with unbroken waves right at the moment when they’re loaded up with energy. The image forces your mind to anticipate what happens next.]