Cutting Room: The Caretaker of Intangible Ingredients

Outs from Skip Frye’s 26.4 quiver shoot.

Light / Dark

In TSJ 26.4, we take a look at the personal quiver of Harry “Skip” Frye and his modus as a designer, craftsman, shaper, and surfer. “One of surfing’s oldest clichés—‘its not the board but the rider’—falls short in the case of Frye,” writes Chris Ahrens of his subject. “When discussing Frye’s ever-expanding quiver, one discusses the man himself.”

To illustrate this inseparability, we sent TSJ photo editor Shawn Parkin down to the Frye factory. Armed with a directive to document perhaps the greatest rider-made surfboard collection on the planet, he of course came back with more images of Frye’s craft and environs than we knew what to do with. The cream of said selection went into our print examination of Frye’s lifetime spent surfing and riding his own designs and templates. The other A-grade images were assembled into the gallery above.

To see more from Parkin’s shoot, which track Frye’s designs and quiver across the decades, and to read the rest Ahrens’ piece, pick up a copy of TSJ 26.4.