All Bona Fides in Order

On the second to last day of the Australian winter, photographer Steve Baccon finds himself head down and elbows high, battling a stiff riptide on a stretch of Cronulla beachbreak as waves clap like thunder around him. 

Baccon is six-foot and two-inches tall, has the wingspan of a competitive swimmer, latissimus dorsi growing out of his sides like monstrous tumors. While other surfers give up and are dragged down the beach to inferior sandbanks, he draws himself into position, scoops the cream off the 4-foot groundswell, repeats, repeats, repeats. 

Later, over a cowboy breakfast of black coffee, Baccon, who is 47 years old (although he’s no baggy-faced frump) explains what he tries to give the viewer of his photographs. 

“I like peace,” he says. “I like calm. I’m not chasing a big wave, or a radical turn. I find that it can be intimidating in a photograph. I know I’ll never surf like Dane Reynolds, but I know I can do a nice little high trim. I don’t shoot…normal. It comes from my press photography training. You’re always looking for a different angle. It’s not always about maximum imagery. I look for landforms. I’ve got a rule-of-thirds grid permanently behind my eyes. I’m always moving forwards, backwards, upwards, downwards—placing
objects within the grid.”

Baccon says his favorite surfers are Australians David Rastovich and Josie Prendergast.

“They have the calmness that gets me,” he says. “It’s corny to say aloud, but they have a connection with the ocean that really has to be seen if you want to believe it. I’m not just throwing out platitudes ’cause I think they’re cool. They never hassle. They sit there on their little part of the reef or the beach, and waves just come to them. There’ll be no waves all morning, they’ll paddle out, find their favorite corner, and bombs will appear out of nowhere.”

At 18, Baccon was employed as a cadet photographer with the then-prestigious newspaper group Fairfax Media, and learned his craft under the wing of another Cronulla surfer, John Veage, the latter an important contributor to Tracks magazine in the 80s and 90s. This was the era of manual lenses, when the ability to spin a focus ring gave a shooter a tremendous prestige. Given the company’s frugal ways, Baccon wasn’t allowed the luxury of a motor drive, lest a single frame of film was wasted. 

“It was hard training, but it was the best training,” he says of a job that paid $270 a week. “If you took a bad picture, John wouldn’t sugarcoat his feelings. You’d have to go out and do it again. A good photo was met with silence. You were accountable for everything.” 

Over his three-year cadetship, Baccon, bag of cameras and lenses slung over his shoulder, could be sent anywhere from a bushfire to a car accident to a surfing contest, the Olympic Games or a press conference for, say, the soccer great Pelé.

The cadetship turned into a gig as staff photographer with the magazine supplement of a major Sunday newspaper. Think The New York Times Magazine. Lifestyle. Fashion. Celebrities. 

“That changed the course of my career,” says Baccon, who has files of shoots with Matt Damon, Dwayne Johnson, Tommy Lee, Dave Grohl, and others on his stack of hard drives. “It got me into features, portraiture, lifestyle, and fashion. And that’s where I am now. It’s my work.” 

Occasionally, Baccon will be commissioned by a surfing company to create an advertising campaign. He’ll be flown to Hawaii, the Maldives, Maui, Western Australia, the Philippines, or Vanuatu with models or surfers, sometimes both, to create something cohesive, commercial, and authoritative. 

He takes the assignments so seriously that after each shoot he chooses the best shots, creates a 120-page document that includes hand-drawn asides, and has it bound into a hardcover book with a title (HI, Vanuatu, Maldives, Land/Sea) stitched into the pastel cloth covers. 

“Regrets of a photographer?” I ask him.  

“One,” he says.  

As a cadet, he was sent with Veage to photograph Jacques-Yves Cousteau, seven years before the French ocean conservationist died.  

“I blew it,” says Baccon. “My photo was underexposed and it was backlit. I still have the negative.”

“Then you must’ve employed Photoshop to breathe life back into it.” 

“I tried to recently,” he says. “But it was so bad. So bad.”

“What kind of bad, Steve?”

“So bad I had to let it go.”

[Feature image: Matt Meola, Maui, 2015. The end section of this wave is really heavy, and the speed created by waves like this can be tricky for most people to figure out. Matt was comfortable with it. He didn’t hold anything back.]