Waterworld

The year was 1975, and only the most courageous among us had yet inspected the guts of a Pipeline tube. Steve Wilkings, then a staff photographer at Surfer, aimed to deliver this view to the pages of the magazine remotely, by rigging a camera to the back of a surfboard ridden and personally crafted for the task at hand by Gerry Lopez.

It’s easy to take the novelty of the endeavor for granted by the standards of the present day, as POV tube shots have since become ubiquitous. “Back then, tube riding itself was still a pretty new thing,” Lopez remembers. “This is way before the commonplace GoPro shot. Sure, there were guys pulling into tubes, but not that many people were coming out of them. That’s why that angle was so spectacular. George Greenough had mounted a camera to his shoulder to capture the inside of the tube around the same time, but Wilkings had this idea to capture the wave from behind the surfer and behind the board, so that you could actually see someone riding inside the tunnel.”

Lopez shaped a 7’10” Pipeliner, swapping the standard-issue pintail with a wider diamondtail to accommodate the camera rig. Wilkings bolted on a short tripod with a custom waterproof camera housing. The camera inside was connected to a radio antenna that Wilkings could use to operate the shutter with a remote control from the beach.

Lopez set out to test the camera board on a classic winter day. “I took off on a pretty good-sized wave,” he says. “It was 8-to-10-foot Pipeline. 

I remember riding straight to the bottom of that first wave, and the board pearled because it was so heavy and unwieldy with all the camera equipment attached to it. I got heaved off, landed on my neck, and lost the board. This is before anyone used leashes, so I swam to the beach. I guess Steve kept shooting, because he has a whole sequence of me wiping out and then the board popping up with no camera on it. I didn’t know what happened. When I saw the board wash in with no camera, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, shit—I can’t believe I lost it on my first wave.’”

Wilkings assumed the camera rig had been made a permanent fixture inside the cavernous reef, but minutes later he spotted it washing onto the beach unharmed, the camera still dry inside the housing. He went back to work and fortified the mounting system to withstand a Pipeline beating, and Lopez adjusted his angle of attack to account for the added weight. 

Wilkings captured a barrel sequence of Lopez’s next attempt, and the rest is history. That season, the cast of ’70s Pipeline regulars, including Lopez, Rory Russell, and Owl Chapman, all piloted the camera board while Wilkings stood on the beach minting the first behind-the-surfer tube shots at Pipeline.

While the camera-board images are among Wilkings’ trademark work as a photographer, they represent the progression of a career dedicated to pushing against whatever technical limitations presented themselves. His first published photo was captured with a single-shot telephoto lens that his high school had purchased in order to capture action photos of jocks for the yearbook. “The little telephoto worked fine for a baseball diamond, but it could barely get you close enough to shoot a decent surf photo,” Wilkings says. He took the camera down to County Line on the LA/Ventura border, shuffled out into the shallows, and waited for a good wave to roll through before firing the only shot he had in the chamber. The image ran in the readers’ section of Surfer, in 1964, before Wilkings graduated high school. The thrill of seeing his work in the magazine shifted his aspirations from marine biology to a career in photography.

At the time, Wilkings’ family had a weekend house in Hermosa Beach, which, despite the exceedingly lackluster surf, had become a cultural hotbed. “It’s amazing to think just how many amazing surfers were around Hermosa during that time,” he says. “I remember counting nine different surf shops all based within 1 square mile of the beach. It must have been that astounding number of shops bringing surfers down there, because it definitely wasn’t the surf quality.”

This gave Wilkings exceptional subject matter on which to train his lens. He captured sessions with David Nuuhiwa, Lance Carson, Reno Abellira, Robert August, and Donald Takayama as they cycled through town.

Wilkings found a mentor in LeRoy Grannis, who introduced himself one day when they were both shooting photos on the beach in Hermosa. Grannis was a telephone-switchboard installer and repairman before he co-founded International Surfing magazine in 1964, and his photography mentor had been Doc Ball. This placed Wilkings in a rare lineage of surf photographers at a time when knowledge of the craft was still passed exclusively through a limited number of practitioners. “After I knew LeRoy for about six months,” Wilkings says, “he took me to someone’s house and said, ‘I want you to meet this gentleman.’ It turned out it was Doc Ball. I had no idea who he was, even though he only lived a couple of blocks away from me. He was a dentist by profession. He was the second person after Tom Blake to put together a camera housing that would allow you to shoot surf photos from the water.”

Ball knew another LA-based dentist to the Hollywood stars, named Don James, who gained early access to highly improved telephoto lenses. “The connections that Don James had to the motion-picture industry enabled him to get his hands on really cutting-edge telephoto lenses at a time when they were very expensive and nobody else had them, which meant he could shoot photos where the surfer wouldn’t just look like a tiny speck in the distance,” says Wilkings. 

“Other than those guys, I didn’t know of anyone who was seriously taking surf photos during those years. I’m saying all of this to emphasize they really wanted to share the joys of surfing and what it felt like to be out in the water. The amount of work they did just to come up with a single surf photo was truly amazing.”

Wilkings set out to build upon the progress of his mentors in capturing a more intimate view of surfing from the water, and he noted the limitations of Doc Ball’s water housing: It was heavy, it didn’t allow you to look into the viewfinder to frame up your shot, and the camera could shoot only a single image before you needed to return to the beach to reload the film.

Wilkings’ father ran a plastics manufacturing company and helped him develop a custom housing that was far more advanced than anything else available at the time. It was lightweight, watertight, and could accommodate a motor-drive camera with a variety of lenses. The motor drive allowed Wilkings to shoot some of the first action sequences from the water, rather than a single frame. “With my dad’s special knowledge of plastics and plexiglass, I could pretty much build anything I wanted very early on, and that helped my work stand out,” Wilkings says. “We continued improving the camera housing, and whenever something broke, I had the ability to easily fix it. Developing the camera housings opened up a whole new world of possibilities.”

There was no better forum for Wilkings’ water photography than the North Shore. Wilkings made his first trip there with Grannis in the winter of 1966, a year before developing his first custom water housing. “I had worked all summer long in a dishwashing job to save up for eight rolls of black-and-white film, two rolls of color film, and my airfare to get to Hawaii,” he says.

Grannis picked Wilkings up from the airport in Honolulu late at night. “As we were driving to the North Shore, LeRoy was telling me, ‘The waves are going to be epic tomorrow,’” Wilkings says. “‘You’re going to remember it for the rest of your life.’”

They drove down to Waimea the next morning, and sets were already closing out the bay. “It took hours before a couple of guys finally paddled out, and then you could see how big it was,” Wilkings says. “I remember thinking that I needed to be really careful conserving my film. I didn’t want to blow everything I packed for the trip on the first day. Later, I realized that was the stupidest thing I could have thought. Looking back on it, that was probably the best I’ve seen Waimea in my entire life. LeRoy shot, like, 20 rolls of film, and I shot two.”

The following winter, while staying with Ben Aipa on the North Shore, Wilkings received an offer letter from Surfer to take up the post Ron Stoner had vacated as photo editor. In parallel, Wilkings also received an offer to study photography at ArtCenter in Pasadena. “Working at Surfer was a lifelong dream,” he says. “It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make, but I turned down the offer and started at ArtCenter two weeks later. There was still a lot that I wanted to learn about photography, and I decided Surfer would still be there in a few years.”

After graduating, Wilkings relocated to Honolulu, and in 1972 Surfer’s photo editor, Art Brewer, put Wilkings on retainer as a staff photographer. His water photography quickly stood out among his contemporaries. 

“Wilkings was regularly coming back with images of Pipeline that no one had ever seen before,” says Jeff Divine, ​​who was also a Surfer staff photographer at the time. “He really opened everyone’s eyes to how grand, majestic, and hollow Pipeline is. He would be out on a raft shooting photos there, or at Sunset, when not many other photographers were doing that. 

Beyond just pushing the boundaries of water photography, his technical expertise—selecting lenses and understanding how to expose film—was so much more advanced than other surf photographers due to his formal training.”

The apotheosis of Wilkings’ trials with the camera board came while chasing a swell to Maalaea, on Maui, where, with Owl Chapman piloting the rig, he captured perhaps the most iconic images of his career. “I can’t tell you how many times I went to Maui trying to catch a swell at Maalaea,” Wilkings says. “Those days when everything would come together were extremely rare and hard to predict. If you’re on Oahu and someone tells you it’s going off, you’re going to miss it. I remember finally getting a little advanced warning that it should be breaking. I made the trip down there, and the conditions were amazing. Owl Chapman took out the camera board and only caught one wave, but it was perfect, and I got that tube shot.”

After 30 years living on Oahu, Wilkings returned to California and served as photo archivist at the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente until 2018. “To this day, I still miss Hawaii and have every hope and intention of moving back there eventually,” Wilkings says.

What stands out in his memory aren’t the harrowing Pipeline sessions but the tight-knit summer gatherings where he lived over on the South Shore.

Lopez concurs.

“Sure, we had plenty of great days together at Pipeline, but the heyday for us was really those sessions on the South Shore with Wilkie,” Lopez says. “Ala Moana was a real social event. During that time, you had Reno Abellira, Larry Bertlemann, Michael and Derek Ho, Ben Aipa and his whole crew, Buttons, and Mark Liddell—just a truly amazing group of guys. Wilkie would come hang in the parking lot after we surfed and have us back to his studio in the evenings for a slideshow. Other photographers came and went, but Steve lived right there, and he was always on top of it. His coverage of that era is more complete than anyone else.”

[Feature image: Gerry Lopez, Pipeline, after we’d been developing the camera board for a few years. When I first built this rig, in 1975, I had a single-shot camera. That eventually progressed into a motor-drive camera that could shoot multiple images, paired with a fisheye lens to give a fuller view, as seen here. Gerry is standing about 8 to 10 inches forward of where he normally would, to compensate for the added weight of the rig.]