Noble Rot

Photographer Rob Gilley uncovers some “beneficial fungus.”
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In the life span of a wine grape, there exists a somewhat rare, late-stage, hyper-sweetening of the fruit called noble rot. This highly desirable phenomenon is triggered by random environmental factors and, if exploited properly, will lead to an intense dessert wine. For the most part, noble rot is completely out of the hands of the winemaker. Simply put, it’s a gift from the gods.

It occurred to me recently that the same kind of thing can also happen to a photograph. While picking my way through thousands of aging, long-ignored transparencies, I noticed a select few had improved
significantly—and unexpectedly—with time. In the course of discerning the reasons behind this improvement, I also realized it was mostly due to enviromental factors beyond my photographic control. Suddenly, the similarities between wine grape harvesting and photograph editing took a sharp turn toward the uncanny.

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, Malibu Wall, 1987.
Derek Hynd, North Shore, 1989.
Taj Burrow, Jeffreys Bay, 2003.

In my mind, a musty metaphor stretched like neoprene from one world to another. It’s the kind of thinking that can take place, I suppose, when one makes the career transition from long-time surf photographer to wine-country tour guide. Admittedly, the Argentinian Malbec I was sipping while I worked helped the analogy along nicely. Drinking on the job came with an easy excuse. For more than 10 years, I’d ignored three, shoulder-high, deep-drawer, bursting-from-the-seams filing cabinets—something of the order of 85,000 transparencies, which I’d lined on the worktable in my garage in stacked, waiting-to-be-edited rows like Cabernet Sauvignon vines in a megalithic Napa Valley vineyard. The task was daunting by any standard. 

In fact drinking wasn’t even enough. I found that I also had to keep the monotony at bay by playing up the wine comparisons in my head. Right off the bat, however, I recognized an analogy flaw. I wasn’t really harvesting for wine grapes. A more accurate analysis suggested I was making proverbial grappa by sifting discarded seeds, stems, and skins.

Zippers, San Jose Del Cabo, 1991. From left to right: Mark Gabriel, Kaipo Guerrero, Christian Fletcher, Sean McNulty, Herbie Fletcher, David Nuuhiwa, Kelly Slater, Unidentified, Nathan Fletcher, Jonathan Paskowitz, Vince de la Peña, Taylor Knox, Kevin Billy. Although there’s generally a spirit of collaboration among surf photographers, some things are still kept close to the vest. For me it was the absolute magic of a very specific focal length: 28mm. Wide enough to get the whole wave in the frame and to preset the focus for water shots, and tight enough to render a wave’s actual size and to avoid distortion. A great lens for water and land, proof of which is offered here: a preset focus that captures a view of some absolute legends. This same roll also produced an action shot of Kelly Slater that landed on the cover of Surfer magazine.

The photos I was editing had already been picked through once before. A long time ago, a very small percentage of them had been submitted to magazines, and a much smaller percentage of those had actually been published. What I had before me, in essence, were orphans—grapes that had missed the bucket the first time and had, by now, fermented nicely on their own.

Once I noticed this trend, I began to put these orphans in separate slide pages, which in turn formed a new stack. Soon, I had a nice little collection. The question then became: what to make of them? This apparent roadblock obviously required a bit more thinking and, as a matter of course, another glass of Malbec. 

Waimea Bay, 1985. This was my first trip to the North Shore, and my first time seeing proper Waimea. After shooting perfect, 20-foot conditions from up on the heiau, I went down to the street and snapped a few portraits. To my surprise, a very seasoned Peter Cole emerged from the surf almost simultaneously, still adrenalized and beaming, even after all the years. I think it’s important for surf photographers to contribute to the historical record. Often, we’re the only ones to observe sessions from start to finish, and the only witnesses to certain performances.
Mikey Todd, Seychelles, 2004. Nothing educates like travel. For example, it wasn’t until I went to the Seychelles that I really began to understand trade swell wrap. After milking a groundswell to the last drop, Mike and I shifted into tourist mode and decided to drive around Mahé in our rent-a-car. We drove south, and when we got to the bottom corner of the island, what we saw kind of shocked us. A solid overhead swell was wrapping around a granite headland, and pushing clean, Rocky Point-like lefts into an idyllic bay. Knowing the swell forecast, we had no idea where this surf could be coming from, until we realized that the trade winds, which had been blowing for days and days on the other side of the island, had gathered enough cumulative strength to push a large wind swell around the bottom of the island. Luckily, Mike had thrown his board in the car, and rather quickly celebrated our discovery with an exuberant snap-stall.

I drank the reddish-purple juice, sat the glass down, and looked through my little orphan stack again. What I saw there, this time, weren’t  “also-ran” castaways. Instead, I found many images that had never been submitted in the first place. It was a batch of eviscerated sequences, grab shots, end-of-the-roll afterthoughts, out-of-favor surfers and equipment, postage stamps, understudies, before-the-swell-really-kicked-in nuggets, foreign assignments, calendar insets, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and personal shots that had now strangely ripened. Like the grapes required for a classified Bordeaux, what I had before me was a true mixture—a blend that simply needed to be laid up in the oak of some printed pages.

Cane Garden Bay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, 2007. Few places in the known world have a more Eden-like beauty, both for those who surf and those who don’t, than the British Virgin Island of Tortola. What a terrible tragedy it was, then, that Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 and the fifth most powerful Atlantic storm on record, ran directly over the this island and its neighbors in 2017. My family had just visited the island the year prior to the storm, and so the post-apocalyptic video footage was particularly heart wrenching. To see lush hillsides so defoliated, moored boats rendered into matchsticks, and entire communities—some of the exact places we visited—reduced to unrecognizable rubble was almost too much to process. The storm was so strong it looked like the island had endured a cosmic Agent Orange attack. Here’s wishing a speedy recovery to those affected, and for the island to fully regain everything that was lost.
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