Portfolio: Al Mackinnon

Surveying the files of a British Isles-based photographer
Portfolio

Light / Dark

I’ll never forget a conversation with a Hawaiian surf photographer whilst in the water at Carmelitas, Puerto Escondido. He told me with some conviction that there were “no waves in the U.K.” This is not a wave and it’s not in England.
Two of the results of climate change are rising sea levels and less predictable weather. Coastal communities and buildings that have stood for a hundred years or more face an uncertain future and parts of the coast have changed irreversibly in recent years. This was shot on the south coast of Cornwall at Porthleven during an impressive winter swell, the briny vapor filtering winter sun as giant backlit barrels detonated on dry sand. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
In early December 2013, Britain’s North Sea coast was bracing for a combination of giant swell and very high tides, a lethal combination that resulted in the worst tidal surge in 60 years. Thousands of homes were evacuated due to flooding and there were several deaths. Most spots were washing through, unable to handle the magnitude of the swell, but for a few surfers who knew where to look, the rewards were great. The flooding closed roads, and power outages caused by the storm made getting there a challenge. (My car was damaged driving through a flood). But nothing was going to stop us from scoring on conditions not seen since January 1953. Here Patch Wilson scampers as a wave crashes over the seawall. We scored this spot alone as gentle evening light illuminated the chocolate barrels.
One of the joys of the far-flung reaches of the U.K. is the lack of people and therefore cars on the road. I’ve never been a fan of traffic jams. But some forms are more acceptable than others.
I have to say swimming with and doing watershots of sea lions is one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. They are such playful, inquisitive, photogenic characters! Even when sunbathing afterward, they make great subjects. The coat’s sheen on this one is like sculptural silver.
Patch Wilson hails from the beautiful town of St. Ives in Cornwall, known for its light and a large artists’ community. It also plays host to Cornwall’s Tate gallery. With an array of waves within striking distance, the town also happens to have produced a number of excellent surfers over the years and several of them have made the pilgrimage to the heavier waves off Ireland’s west coast. Aileens, or The Cliffs, has become famous in recent times and Patch’s dedication to the wave has seen him move to the nearby town of Lahinch. This particular evening, the conditions were ideal, but we were up against it with the best stage of the tide arriving after dark—a common problem in the depths of winter here. The waves started quite friendly, at least as friendly as this place gets, but as sunset approached each set grew hollower and hollower in the pastel hues. I recall having a discussion with Patch prior to going out there. I thought that with the period in the swell we might see some serious barrels before dark. He wasn’t convinced and took a smaller board. He had a couple of nice ones and then shortly after this picture was taken he found himself seriously undergunned on a square, triple-overhead bomb. I can still remember seeing this stick figure getting lip launched, fully extended into the trough. On bigger days he’d been wearing his Patagonia inflatable vest, but had neglected it on this occasion and got quite a working over. In fact, when I got to him, his eyes were as big as golf balls. He was clearly rattled and gasping for breath. It was a while before he spoke. Once we’d cleared the lineup the first thing he said was, “That was the worst beating I’ve had out here, let’s go home.” We left as the swell was pumping through and I know it was a lesson for us all. The place is never that friendly. Those were the last shots we got on that trip. He was injured for weeks afterwards. Indeed he’s since said he’ll wear his vest every time he surfs out there (and probably won’t be undergunned again).
This almost-perfectly sums up the majority of the Northern European winter: incessant gales, rain, hail. Plenty of swell, but most often blown out and then, in between the weather’s raging, one finds some very, very good surf. Seeing this picture again reminds me that we were hunkering down out of the storm. I remember seeing the incredible brown light. It was Velvia film (RIP) light and I was trying to go photograph it. It was impossible. Even weighed down by my camera bag, I was getting buffeted so severely I ended up having to seek cover, shooting out of a window to get a crisp image.
Jayce Robinson is one of Britain’s most technically proficient surfers and another St. Ives lad. This was right at the end of a somewhat tricky session on a British slab. We hadn’t got much until this point, but this wave worked out okay and we could do the walk back before dark.

Cool Cave Art

Al Mackinnon’s Evolutionary Path.

A Somewhat Seedy Start

The boy could shoot. How did I know? Because he kept sending prints  to the magazine where I worked. They were muddy, sometimes tatty shots, just like all the others submitted to the “Reader’s Waves” section in The Surfer’s Path, circa mid-90s. But Al Mackinnon’s were actually good. So good, in fact, that he snagged a free yearlong subscription three times in a row. Cheeky bastard.

To explain: Reader’s Waves was a popular section of our magazine. British surfers loved seeing 1-hour-photo prints of themselves, their pals, or their local wind-slop printed in a real magazine. And they sniggered at the play on words, too. You see porn mags are a fixture on every U.K. newsstand. Top shelf, there they sit, lined up like the nation’s not-very-guilty conscience. And yes, there’s always a section called “Reader’s Wives,” featuring muddy, tatty photos of dirty spouses. Phwoaarr! as they say in England.

Every week, envelopes full of home-shot surf porn would flop through the letterbox at TSP, and each issue we chose a winner. Sometimes finding any reader shots hot enough to run was tough. But over and over, this young teenager’s photos jumped out. An uncommon number of Al’s shots were, well, Phwoaarr!

Scotland’s “coldwater Nias.” Andy Bain and I would thaw out in this horsebox, away from the biting wind.

So, in a way, that’s how he started. Today he’s a full-on, full-time career surf photographer, in demand from editors, marketing managers, and far beyond. You may have thought the surf photographer gig died with the advent of GoPro and the Samsung Galaxy. But even today there are still rare beasts who roam the coasts, not only getting to surf and shoot stills for money, but actually making a living doing it. Al’s one of those, and as his first editor, with a working relationship that lasted the full 17 years of our TSP experiment, I say: “Damn right. The man can shoot.”

Who He?

Turns out Al’s dad, James, is a bodysurfing obsessive. And an outdoorsman. “The happiest I ever see him is when he’s bodysurfing, or in the Scottish Highlands,” says Al, offering two key clues as to where his professional and philosophical journey may be rooted. 

James is Scottish, though he and his Chilean wife, Liz, raised their three children in Sussex, England. But his mum was from Australia, later moving to Jersey in the Channel Islands. “She went back in her 90s and it turned out she was the oldest living member of the Bondi Surf Club. They gave her a standing ovation,” recalls Al with pride. More clues.

Truly Al’s surf shooter genesis began in Jersey, where his grandma lived. Here, where the tides slew in or out over a distance of 130 feet every six hours, there is indeed surf. Some of Britain’s earliest wave-riding happened here, and to be young, born of a bodysurf-obsessed father, descendant of a dame of Bondi, and spending school vacations on its shores year after year, was enough to imbue brine in the boy’s bones, and saltwater into his desires. “I think I wanted to be a marine biologist first,” Al tells me. “But at some point my older sister Sasha had a boyfriend who surfed. I was in awe of him and soon decided I wanted to be a professional surfer.”

This was taken in the Gaedhealtacht, a mostly Irish-speaking, unspoiled part of Ireland. I can’t remember this lad’s name, but we sat in the winter sun talking about the history of the region. He was amused that we were there to surf and spoke long of the perils of the sea. He had a marvellous presence. Life’s narrative was etched into his face and he kindly agreed to let me make a picture.

So in a way, he’s achieved his dream and eschewed it at the same time. He doesn’t follow the tour. He prides himself in knowing very little about who’s hot on the WCT. Al’s more about clambering into 6-mil wetsuits and swimming out to catch some of that scarcest of resources in higher latitudes: light. “I just like moody,” he says, “There’s a lot of really interesting light up in the far north. Especially that winter, post-frontal light that’s absolutely glorious after a storm, or in the middle, when squalls pass through.” 

Light. Landscape. And cold, remote surf. These are his elements. They were the ingredients of his first Reader’s Waves photos and they’re where his focus remains, despite regular forays closer to the equator and deep into surfing’s mainstream. 

A Break

“It started getting real,” he tells me, “thanks to a photo in TSP. It was a shot of Thurso East—big, perfect, early morning. O’Neill was getting ready to run the first WQS event up there. They saw the photo in the mag and ended up doing a full buy-out, running it for ads, posters, and all the rest of the contest branding stuff. And we made an agreement that I’d do the event photography, too. That was when things became serious—if you can call surf photography serious. Suddenly it was a job.”

By then Al was in good stead to handle it. He’d taken photography as a specialism in his senior years at school and “become completely obsessed with the dark room. I just adored the alchemy of film,” he says. Originally he’d thought his fortes were painting and draftsmanship but he began to treat photography as an equivalent challenge. “I read Ansel Adams’ technical trilogy [The Camera, The Negative, and The Print], which was fucking hardcore. It was like trying to read Stephen Hawkings’ Brief History of Time—in photographic terms that’s what it is. It took me a long time with numerous rereads to try and figure out what he was saying.” 

No surprise, then, that Ansel Adams looms large in Al’s work. To tackle that moody light you need an artist’s eye and a technician’s skill. And despite his unquestioned talent in the water—the boy can also swim—to me, Al’s shots are all about landscape. Those first submissions were broad views over Hebridean beaches, the golden sun and serrated cliff-lines all but competing with the perfect, empty waves that should have been the subject. For Al, the context was everything.

“Story, and wider narrative have always been a big thing for me and landscapes are so much part of the places we surf. Everyone loves a beautiful lineup shot. It’s like the moment when you come over the rise and see the waves and there’s a set coming in. It’s special for almost all surfers I know. So I love shooting lineups. I also love shooting water. Being on the beach shooting people doing maneuvers? Way down the list for me.”

And the landscape obsession has garnered recognition. “Actually Instagram published one of my photos from a trip to Patagonia recently. It got 1.5 million likes or something, which was a real honor because I’m a surf photographer, and to get some recognition for my landscape work kind of pushed a different button for me.”

That first job with O’Neill forced Al into digital. Event requirements meant there was no time to wait for film processing so he had to sell his beloved XPan Hasselblad to buy his first Canon DSLR. Surprisingly, the transition was easy. “I wasn’t wearing the ‘Death Before Digital’ t-shirt like some of the older surf photographers. I’d spent a lot of time trying to master film and the darkroom, but film was expensive and took so long to get feedback from that I was comfortable with the change. Plus, the fact that in cold water you didn’t have to swim back in after half an hour and pull your wetsuit off and dry your hands and warm them up and change the roll…that was a bonus.”

The Pioneer’s Privilege

These days “cold water surfing” is a thing. It has been branded and commodified to sell us a different dream than the original tropical surfing trope. Open any current surf magazine and there’s a high chance you’ll see Canada, Scotland, Iceland, Norway, or Ireland. It sells wetsuits, jackets, breathable underwear, and so on. Commercially, Al’s been part of this, taking major projects for O’Neill, Finisterre, and Patagonia to name a few. And it makes sense. In an unwitting and organic way, he’s one of the pioneers.

Julian, a local fisherman from a rarely photographed region of Costa Rica, could well have been Santiago from Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea. He spoke of his colorful life, sharing sage suggestions and stories that kept our crew rapt. We were indebted to him for his calls on when and where not to spear fish. That advice likely saved us from ciguatera poisoning, something for which I remain grateful.

Over the years that we printed TSP, a small crew of young British photographers emerged as the lead guard of this “cold water movement” in Europe. Tim Nunn, Roger Sharp, Mickey Smith, and Al MacKinnon were the four guys I watched not just shooting jaw-dropping photos in colder waters, but spending real time discovering the purest gold through dedication and an unnatural indifference to hypothermia. Despite the hardships, we can see now they were incredibly privileged. While most of the surf world moaned about crowds, and discoveries had leveled off after the explorers of the 70s and 80s had surveyed the whole known world, here were these humble British lads living the discovery dream—albeit a dark and fucking cold one. 

I pinned Al down on this to see if he realized how lucky he was. “Yes,” he says. “I realize now that this really was a magical time, a time when you were discovering new waves and there weren’t many people around. And among the people you did see, there was great camaraderie. The cold-water marketing moniker didn’t exist. It was just surfing and going to new, beautiful places, far from all the song and dance of the mainstream surf world. It was understated, but really rich in its own way.

“There were real characters wherever you went, and some truly terrible surfing going on. But people were absolutely loving it. I remember in the Outer Hebrides in the early days the guys had just one wetsuit between them, which they’d share and take turns using. Except that one of them was about 6’10” and another was 5’6″ and so of course, yeah…that suit didn’t fit any of them. But they didn’t care. Winter in Scotland? No fekin’ worries.”

The Larger World

Don’t get me wrong. Al doesn’t just do sub-zero. He’s adept with a tropical palette as much as moody grays. Over the years, it became clear that wherever he was shooting he’d find moments that mattered. Perhaps none more so than this:

“It was a really expensive, month-long trip to South Africa. I’d bankrolled it myself and nothing had come together. Near the end an incredible swell hit Cape Town. We were at Dungeons and Greg Long got this massive wave. Huge. Maybe the biggest wave ever ridden on the African continent. I got the shot and we ended up winning the Billabong XXL Biggest Wave Award. So I went to California to the ceremony. It was a crazy thing for me to experience—the red carpet, Brad Gerlach handing us the check on stage, TV crews, and all that.” 

The brown trout, or “brownie” as it is affectionately known among fly fishermen, is arguably the wiliest of quarry and has defeated me on many an occasion. This was taken some years ago during a three-month trip, hunting waves on a quieter stretch of Scotland’s coast. Sunny days are not the time to be fly fishing for several reasons, not least as it would seem the fish find it easier to spot fisherman. Nonetheless, I wanted to recco a few hill lochs. The landscape is particularly barren in that area—no trees or shrubs for cover—and so I crawled the last part to the water’s edge. I noticed a fish rising on the other side so I made my way around and ended up capturing this moment on film. It was the only thing I caught that day.

The real score, however, wasn’t the money they walked away with, but a friendship that’s only grown. “That wave sorted Greg out because he ended up getting a Billabong sponsorship, which he still has today. And another upshot was that we became friends. Since then we’ve done a lot of trips—me, him, and his brother, Rusty. We’ve done Todos a few times, Puerto, all over California, Cornwall, Maderia, and a bunch of others.” 

Narrative Instinct

So Al’s gone from a teenage wannabe to world class surf photographer, published in major magazines and newspapers and even representing the Canon brand as a quintessential pro. 

My last question to him is: why? “To me surf photography is like those ancient cave paintings. They’re pretty much all we know of the people that did them. You might find the odd bone or tool or something but essentially we know very little about those people, and the paintings are their story. So for me it’s a chronicling thing—telling our story using art, craft, and nature, so we all have those memories. To me, these are our cave paintings.”

[Feature image: There are few surfers I’d prefer to have on hand in left slabs than Tom Lowe. No doubt he charges big waves, but he’s pretty handy in thick, compact waves too. This one was toward the end of the session and flared dramatically before spitting him out, a big grin plastered across his face.]

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