Color Came Later

Nick Green and I pulled into Angourie in the dark and didn’t bother checking it. The swell had been east all week, and there were no other cars. Barely awake, we ran down the track, jumping off the point as the sun winked at us over the horizon. Our luck was in. Only it wasn’t 4 foot, as we thought. It was 8.

Suddenly, I was scratching to get under a set drawing off the back ledge. After paddling over the last wave, I looked around. Greeny was gone. I spotted him a few minutes later, getting washed through the boulders, headed toward the “Life and Death” rocks. It appeared that despite having survived the most-furious days at Shipstern Bluff, swimming in cold, brutal water, the Tasmanian was about to drown in warm North Coast honey.

Ten minutes later, he made it back into the lineup. “Holy shit!” he guffawed, half laughing, half not. His board was banged up, and he was sporting a huge set of tiger claws across his thigh. For Green, the whole episode reinforced his long-held conspiratorial belief that the Australian mainland was not for him.

In his early twenties, he’d moved to the continent for a year, living in Newcastle, trying to crack a career in surf photography. He liked Newcastle. He liked the anonymity—that didn’t happen in Tassie. And he liked the career opportunities—they didn’t happen in Tassie either. But Newcastle wasn’t Tasmania. He couldn’t look out his window and feel like he was on an island at the bottom of the world. He couldn’t drive an hour and find himself utterly alone in a vast wilderness.

Green grew up in Blackmans Bay, a short drive out of Hobart, a bit of an outsider to surfing. “It wasn’t a surf town,” he says. Having started out taking photos as a teen after his parents gave him a digital point-and-shoot, he quickly developed an eye. He traveled around Tasmania, living in his van for three years, a little lost but mostly found, surfing and shooting and working out what he wanted to do with his life. It was during this time that a chance encounter with a short man in a beanie put him on a path.

Dion Agius also grew up in Tasmania—but he moved to the Gold Coast at 14. He was not an outsider to surfing. Agius was a freesurf star who also made things happen behind the scenes: films, surf trips, mag shoots, art shows, whole surfing movements. The pair met one day in the car park at Dark Hollow. At the time, Agius had just bought a place on the Tasmanian east coast and was reconnecting to his island roots. He immediately recognized that Green had a rare eye, and off they went.

“If you tried to get Greeny to just shoot action, he wouldn’t fucking do it,” Agius recalls. “But put a surfer in front of a beautiful landscape, or put him in the water and let him find his unique little spin on it, then he’d make magic.”

Apart from connecting Green to a network of surfers on the mainland, Agius also taught him the value of working hard—and the value of his work. Rather than flood social media, Agius would hold material for a higher calling: slow-burn film and book projects.

Soon after they began collaborating, one of Green’s shots of Agius landed a mag cover. The pair then partnered on a Tasmania-themed book and film project, Dark Hollow. Green was on his way.

In 2019, he entered the Follow the Light competition for emerging surf photographers and, to his astonishment, won. His portfolio was starkly different from those of the other entrants, who’d captured the color and movement of California and Hawaii. Green’s photos included monochrome shots of Tasmanian landscapes and took the viewer somewhere a little darker. A Mickey Smith devotee, he’d noted the atmospheric use of the Irish landscape in Smith’s work and seen “Tasmania without trees.”

Asked to submit an accompanying essay, he framed the role his photography played as therapy for his personal struggles. At 17 and badly depressed—“attacked by the black dog,” as he puts it—he’d thrown himself in front of a moving car. He was lucky to survive, suffering a broken hip and snapped femur. “I think that was the first time I’d put pen to paper on what I’d been through, relating all of it together,” he remembers. “That was the first time I was like, ‘Maybe it’s all linked. Maybe shooting photos is helping me.’”

Unaware these details would be shared publicly as part of his win, Green was still processing it himself when stories with titles like “Surf Photography Saved Nick Green’s Life” were published in the media. Green was worried people might interpret his story the wrong way—like he was trading on it. “I mean, everyone goes through stuff, and I didn’t like the idea of people thinking I put my story out there to get some gain out of it,” he says. The idea that surf photography had saved his life was also a classically shallow, online take that skimmed over the reality of living with mental illness. “Artistic expression is a good thing, but it’s also who you surround yourself with and how you look after yourself,” he continues. “Art alone isn’t going to save you.”

In time, Green made peace with these details of his life being in the public domain. It was a modern discussion about a modern problem. “It opened up conversations with people I loved, and people I didn’t even know reached out to me,” he says. “That outweighed the anxiety I’d had about it being out there.”

Professionally, the win landed him on a big stage, and Green soon found himself on Oahu’s North Shore, shooting with the likes of Mikey February and Harry Bryant, selling ads, and banging more covers. His success allowed him to put down roots at home. “I’d been living in and out of my van down at Eaglehawk Neck, and I always thought it’d be sick to have a place of my own,” he explains. The small surf town on the Tasman Peninsula was tightly held, so Green started putting notes in letterboxes, looking for a private sale. A small shack popped up, and he threw down a deposit. It was a Tassie classic—slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding bush but with a view from every window. He now just had to pay the mortgage.

For a Tasmanian surf photographer, that mostly meant shooting Shipstern Bluff. “It’s the only consistent paid surf opportunity in Tassie—although it’s not even that consistent,” Green says. The reality is that surf photographers in Tasmania are simply landscape photographers who occasionally capture a surfer wandering into frame. There are simply too many other breathtaking things to shoot. “I’ve never really seen myself as strictly a surf photographer,” Green explains. “Surfing’s part of it, but it’s never been the whole thing. I think in the last few years that’s become even more true.”

While shooting surfing is an exercise in triangulating a moment in a dynamic scene—surfer, wave, backdrop…click—there’s also an art to shooting a landscape that hasn’t moved in a few million years, waiting for the ocean or the light or both to hit it just right, to illuminate something—a thought, a feeling, a sense of Gondwanan perspective.

“People don’t understand the lengths he’s going [in order] to get some of those images,” offers Agius, “how dangerous some of the places are. He’ll be by himself in the middle of nowhere, swimming around with seals at the base of a cliff to shoot a wave smashing against it. I’ve never seen someone so comfortable in the water.”

“That sense of overwhelming rawness, it leaves quite a mark,” Green says. “I think when it comes to imagery, to be able to combine that with a deeper meaning, to open conversations or open people’s minds, that’s a powerful thing.”

And while his photography is deliberately evocative, Green doesn’t want it being characterized as “dark.” “I get why people sometimes see my work that way, but for me it’s always been about beauty—the quiet, wild kind,” he says. “If there’s darkness there, it’s part of the honesty. It’s not a true reflection of who I am all the time, but if people see a bit of darkness in the work, that’s fine. It’s part of the wildness, part of the truth.”

Even while shooting surfing, where color is currency, Green will often instinctively take photos in black and white. “I feel it’s often more of an honest and timeless representation,” he says. “It strips away distractions of color, and you’re looking into deeper details.” His dedication to monochrome also echoes a very Tasmanian style of shooting—a nod to some of the greats who’ve come before him.

Olegas Truchanas was born in Lithuania and fought in the resistance during World War II before immigrating to Tasmania. He fell immediately under its spell and wandered off alone into the island’s empty heart with his kayak and camera, becoming a champion for its natural state. 

“Truchanas had artistic insight to a marked degree, and his finest works have a power few have equaled,” writes Max Angus in his biography of the iconic photographer. “His earlier work was monochrome—color came later.…For him, color was merely to enhance the already established tonal pattern of his pictures. His sensitivity to subtle tonality infuses his work so strongly that it has, in fact, the ‘Truchanas look’—the style of the man.”

“Is there any reason why Tasmania should not be more beautiful on the day we leave it than on the day we came?” Truchanas asked rhetorically in 1972, shortly before he drowned while kayaking the Gordon River one last time before it was flooded by a hydroelectric dam project. “If we can revise our attitudes towards the land under our feet, if we can accept a role of steward and depart from the role of the conqueror, if we can accept that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole, then Tasmania can be a shining beacon in a dull, uniform, and largely artificial world.”

Nick Green heard a similar call long ago—art in service of conservation. While Truchanas fought for the island’s rivers and wild interior, Green is focusing on its coastline and oceans. He recently hired a mate’s light plane to photograph the spread of salmon farms down through Storm Bay and the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. He’s also documented the disappearing giant kelp beds on the east coast, ravaged by marine heat waves and sea urchins. His work is already referenced by the environmental movement in Tasmania, and it feels like he has, in the years ahead, the potential to become a Truchanas-like figure of importance for the natural world in Tasmania.

“Greeny is already part of the landscape down there,” says Agius. “He embodies a true kind of Tasmanian, using his photography as a means of preservation. He has silently been going around doing that for years. It’s the most Tasmanian thing you can do.”

[Feature image: The Southern Ocean unravels along the bottom of Tasmania’s rocky shoreline, where ancient eucalyptuses stand sentry. Too far, too cold, too wild for most, the waves largely go unridden—except by Dion Agius.]