The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
The shattered-glass sound of footsteps through broken lava rock cuts the silence on a particularly still and muggy day in North Kona on Hawaii’s Big Island. Photographer and author Kirk Lee Aeder and I crunch-crunch-crunch along the black volcanic path toward the brilliant neon-blue sea beyond Kalahuipua‘a Historic Park. He’s showing me something, or perhaps just killing time while we talk—it’s often indistinguishable on these brief neighbor-island meets.
Aeder is a quiet man and has not the blustery demeanor typical of many of the aging surf photographers I’ve worked with over my career. Some are very “You don’t know shit, kid.” Some are very “Back in my day, grom.” Some are bitter. But Kirk Lee Aeder is none of those things. He seems to choose his words wisely, deliberately, like pulling the shutter-release lever before memory cards came around.
“I first came to the Big Island with my family, when I was 10 years old,” he says. “We saw the black-sand beach at Kaimu, and I remember taking photos of Volcanoes National Park on a Brownie Instamatic. I had no idea that I’d eventually end up living here.”
He shakes his head with a look that asks, “Hard to believe it, huh?”
I, too, am wondering what makes one move to Kona, Hawaii Island, as a surf photographer.
While the talent pool is comparatively rich, the actual waves are not. And in this profession, fewer waves means less work.
“The thing about this island is you really have everything here,” Aeder says, as if reading my mind. “You got fire and ice—snow and lava. There’s just so much to shoot. The beaches might not be as good as Maui or Oahu, but it really is the photography that keeps me here.”
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t gotten Aeder mixed up with his older brother, Erik, another iconic surf photographer, who resides on Maui, the next island over. I’d be dishonest if I said others I’d probed about him didn’t do the exact same thing.
Both men were staff photographers and regular contributors, simultaneously, at Surfing, then Surfer, from the mid-’70s and onward, Kirk getting his start a few years after Erik.
“I think at first [Erik] thought, ‘Aw, my little brother—he’s gonna lose interest fast,’” Aeder says, grinning, as we make our way across the sunbaked earth and into the shade of some trees lining a pond network near the Mauna Lani resort.
While Erik made a name for himself as a more exploratory adventure photographer—one of the first to document iconic waves like Lagundri Bay, Nias, and other far-flung gems in Rapa Nui, Guam, and the Philippines—Aeder first rose to fame documenting the rise of his best friend.
Indeed, every great photographer has their muse. Long before the young pros around Kona allowed Aeder to make them into surf stars, La Jolla’s late, great Chris O’Rourke was Aeder’s. Perhaps underappreciated today, O’Rourke was regarded by the likes of Gerry Lopez as “California’s best surfer” during the late ’70s. Aeder and O’Rourke were teenage classmates, and they made an odd couple. Aeder was mild-mannered even back then. O’Rourke was loud, hot-tempered, wildly talented as a surfer, and known to throw around “Beat it, kook” out at Windansea.
“I think I calmed him down a little, and he brought me out of my shell,” Aeder says, staring out to sea.
We walk around and trace the edges of an ancient Hawaiian fishpond, Aeder showing me a few particularly stunning locations, like an old swimming hole where a local family is presently finding respite from the heat.
Aeder more or less got his in with the major American surf mags via his images of O’Rourke, before his untimely death from Hodgkin lymphoma in 1981, at the unjust age of 22. Aeder stuck around La Jolla to finish college.
“I stayed ’til about ’85 and then just left,” he says. “There just wasn’t anyone to shoot like Chris.”
(Aeder would go on to pen a touching biography about O’Rourke, published in 2012, titled Child of the Storm: How an Angry Young Man Formed a Bond With the Sea and Changed Our Lives Forever, perhaps his own cathartic path to getting through an event that still feels fresh more than 40 years since. He’s also produced other written and photo-centric book-length works, including 2003’s The Great Hawaii Sports Journal and 2005’s Big Island Days.)
Aeder’s family had already moved to the Islands, so he hopped the pond to start fresh on Maui. There, he began to shoot the windsurfing scene—Ho‘okipa being its global mecca—as well as the early Strapped Crew era at Jaws, a kind of inadvertent second angle to his brother, who normally shot water and is still the main man behind the lens out there to this day.
Walking out to a bridge over the small fishpond, Aeder explains that at that time, the mags were going full progression. Photo editors were shifting the focus to the subject rather than the surf, getting near enough for legible logo reads on the bright surfboards and neon wetsuits for ad buys.
Aeder, well, he just wanted to pull back. It was the lineups and landscapes and snowy peaks that told his story, not the up-close whites of their eyes.
“I kind of felt that’s why I took my stuff to Japan,” he recalls, shrugging. “I felt like one of those American baseball players that was running out of options in the US and took their game abroad.”
Aeder moved to Kona in ’93, after he was offered a job on the Big Island by the Japanese-
owned Prince Hotel chain to help open the Hapuna Prince. That connection would eventually lead to extended stints in Japan, where he would shoot the annual Marui Pro on Nii-jima Island and the Omaezaki windsurfing comp. Photographer Don King first showed him the ropes out there, with surfers Buzzy Kerbox and Paul Thurston. Australia’s Surfing World and the Japanese magazines loved his work, and he always had a room at the Prince hotels. Subsequently, he fell in love with the culture, the food, and the people, and learned to speak the language.
Still wondering about the move to the Big Island, I ask him if two Aeders was one too many for a neighbor island like Maui, digging for some dirt. But he chuckles and shakes his head.
“Nah, we get along great,” he says. “Erik loves Maui, and I just really love the Big Island. But I guess after eight years of being on Maui, I came here and stepped out of Erik’s shadow.”
“I’ve always really respected my brother’s passion and drive to find a story and follow it through to completion,” says Erik.
Beyond shooting the Iron Man each year, some pro golf events, and the NFL Pro Bowl on Oahu, Kirk was pretty much the guy to call for shots if you were a pro surfer (or an aspiring one) around Kona.
“Basically, there were two surf shooters when I arrived: Steve Bingham and Eric Baseman,”
he says. “Eric soon moved to Oahu, and my main friend at the time was Ian Haight, one of the best surfers on the island. He really dialed me in.”
“The Big Island can be pretty raw and rough and hard to shoot, but I think that’s a testament to Kirk’s talent,” says Big Island–bred surfer Torrey Meister. “He’s so good, it doesn’t matter about the elements. It can be hard to tell the tale of some of these waves—how gnarly they are with the dry reef—but he can tell that story. He’s always done a great job of capturing what surfing looks and feels like on that island.”
Shane Dorian, Kona’s most famous son, big-wave demigod, and former CT surfer, has shot with Aeder around the island over the past two decades and concurs on his prowess.
“He’s always been a diehard photographer,” Dorian says. “Whether on a job or not, Kirk always seems so passionate about it. Whenever there’s a swell, I usually get a call from him, and we’ve shot a lot over the years. He’s a really kind person. Really nice and always positive—just a great dude.”
Aeder eventually met his wife, Nita, on the Big Island, and the two married in 2003. He points to a small shack on a piece of land in the middle of the fishpond, connected by a small causeway, and says, “It happened right there.”
I nod and wonder if the purpose of our visit here was for this very reveal. If so, I appreciate the sentimentality. Then we turn and begin our trek back.
We talk more about shooting Dorian through the years—and now his son, Jackson, when they’re around—along with the handful of other pros from Kona whom Aeder helped put in print mags through the aughts. From my understanding, shooting on islands outside of Oahu back then could be pretty taboo, unless it was Jaws or Honolua Bay. Kauai, for example, still had a full-scale kapu on it.
That was difficult at times for someone who wanted to pull back, like Aeder. He’s out to capture the surfing, but also this coastline’s rebirth—the molten rock breaking through fissures in Earth’s crust.
“He’s always pretty cool about that stuff,” says Dorian of the “Shoot me, just don’t show anything” neighbor-island calculus. “I get it, though. It is more beautiful to show landscape and perspective, the foreground and background. Landmarks make photos beautiful, right? But Kirk’s always navigated that well and been respectful.
“He’s come up with some really classic ideas for backgrounds in his shots—that stand-up paddler [CJ Kanuha] in front of the lava on the Big Island, or the windsurfer in the pond in front of the Jefferson Memorial. He has a way of getting access and then telling the story right.”
Aeder and I crunch-crunch-crunch back to the dirt car lot, and he mentions, almost as an afterthought, his battle with cancer, an out-of-the-blue event in 2020 where he discovered he had squamous cell carcinoma. He kicked it, but I can sense it was a bit of a terrifying experience, as cancer always is.
“My cancer was caught early. I was fortunate,” he says as I turn the ignition in my rental car. “It returned a year later, but since then, scans have shown nothing. I’ve had enough relatives and friends go through it, so I just thought of them and how they dealt with it. Some made it and some didn’t. Both my parents had different forms of cancer; my mom had two breast-cancer operations, made it through, and lived until she was 91. Others, like my friend Chris, had it early in life and, sadly, put up a battle but couldn’t make it.”
We make our way south down the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway. Aeder looks up at the towering Mauna Kea peak piercing through the cloud line and smiles.
“I’ve realized I’ve lived here longer than I did in La Jolla—a lot longer,” he says. “And there’s still so much I want to shoot here. This island just never ceases to amaze me. What I really love most about here are the volcanoes, though. That lava, especially when it flows into the ocean, witnessing an island grow on—in a way, I get more of a high from that than I do shooting surfing photos. It’s a special, heavy experience to be around.”
[Feature image: The Big Island of Hawaii is like no other place in the world. Madame Pele—the goddess of volcanoes and fire, whose spirit is said to reside in the Halemaumau crater on Kilauea—does what she wants. I took this in 1997, while locals Chris Arruda and Jonah Morgan, two of the best surfers from the island in their day, were checking a spot that used to exist at the base of this flow, before lava covered it. A short distance away was another spot, called Drainpipes, which featured some of the best lefts on the island. Pele showed no mercy—that spot was also covered and taken away.]
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