The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
The heavyweight international portraitist Steve Baccon, a man whose subjects have included Pelé, Nicole Kidman, and Matt Damon, has dressed to meet me in a loose-fitting blue suit made of a heavy cotton and lashed by a belt of Veronica purple, the tonal balance managed by his sun-darkened skin.
After a handshake and an embrace—well, it has been several years—the 53-year-old photographer suddenly unbalances me with a pull and a push and wraps his legs around my torso, his ankles crossing to prevent any escape. A muscled arm of inordinate length swings around my head. I can feel the rough cotton-blend lapel of his suit cutting into the two carotid arteries in my neck, starving my brain of oxygen-rich blood while also compressing the jugular veins, which prevents the deoxygenated blood from leaving. As the choke sinks deep, I notice he has beautiful hands.
I have, as Mailer once said, an existential situation. My fingers bang on the photographer’s forearm.
“Brother,” I say, “I’m out.”
Though he’s recently turned much of his attention to the grappling arts, Baccon grew up in Australia’s Cronulla Beach, watching Mark Occhilupo’s psychic force rearrange local reefs, learning to rearrange them himself.
He first made his name in photography with clean, beautifully arranged portraits of the celebrities that would hit his studio when he was shooting for a prestigious broadsheet newspaper and its weekly magazine.
One of my fondest memories of the man is organizing him to take a portrait for a surfing magazine I owned at the time, around 2008, when he was at the top of the mainstream game and collecting shots of every big-name celeb that strolled through Sydney. I was paying nothing, a couple hundred dollars. Because it was surfing and because we were pals, Baccon had shaved his rate even though he was bringing his own lights and shooting film on his Mamiya 6 × 7 medium-format camera. A little late to the set, he apologized and, shaking his head in disbelief, explained that he’d been employed on a half-day shoot for the criminally low rate of only $5,000.
“One day you’ll look back and you won’t believe the gravy you bathed in,” I whispered to him.
Post-headlock, we laugh about those glitz-drenched days, even if that laughter threatens to hiccup into tears.
Today, like a lot of Australian surfers of middle age, Baccon feels the dilution of surfing culture by the vulnerable adult-learner surfer. And it’s this pain of loss—well, not exactly pain, but more his desire to snatch at the ephemera of surfing before it disappears entirely—that has led him to spend the past 15 years and counting photographing surfing’s most significant shapers, from the zeitgeist-y faddist to the innovators to the old heads and the icons.
“I shot Bob McTavish, Terry Fitzgerald, and Geoff McCoy,” he says of how he got started.
Since those three masters, he has aimed his super-fast 50-millimeter lens at (and this list ain’t all of it) Mark Richards, Darren Handley, Tom Wegener, Derek Hynd, Maurice Cole, Hayden Cox, Sam Egan, Simon Anderson, Malcolm Campbell, and James “Chilli” Cheal. He shoots ’em real shallow depth of field, the lens opened up to f/1.8 to blur out everything but the essential soul.
“I want to get their eyes,” he says.
As for their sculptures?
“I want to show the artisanship and the craftsman behind it,” he says. “I’m still mind-numbingly dumb about design, and I feel most surfers have a lack of appreciation for what they’re riding. These shapers see what other people don’t, especially the innovators like Malcolm and Duncan Campbell. You couldn’t get to where we are now without what these iconic shapers did. Everyone always asks shapers for discounts. If only you knew what went into that surfboard.”
Baccon has photographed Malcolm Campbell five times now, and of course he threw down on a couple of handshapes from the Ventura master: a five-finned Octofish and a Mini Bonzer 5.
But his quiver—family, God, and waves willing—is also filled with a couple of Christensons, a Cox, a Chilli, and a couple of single-fins from Ellis Ericson, the former pro surfer turned shaper.
Ericson was 20 when Baccon kicked off his series. Yesterday, when Baccon drove 10 hours from Sydney to Scotts Head and back to shoot him for a second time, the boy had become a 35-year-old man with a reputation for fine retro-charged boards and a booming surfboard biz.
“A lot of highway miles for a couple of shots,” I tell Baccon.
“I love doing this because, yeah, I lost my spark for surfing, and every time I shoot a shaper, I get invigorated to surf,” he says. “When you look at the board with a shaper, and you’re being guided into seeing the foil, the concave, you can feel their flow. So much work goes into the creation of a single craft—not just the hours to physically build it, but all those years before, of fine-tuning. I want surfers to be enlightened.”
The Shapers Project continues without an end point in sight. Baccon is like a curator of obscure scrolls discovered in the wilderness between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea. He believes in the importance of cataloging history. There could be a book somewhere, sometime.
But Baccon is happier at work. He knows that idleness means misery. He isn’t a man who consoles himself in the wretchedness of drink, so there’s a chance the wheel may never stop. He plans on Hawaii—there’s Rawson, Pyzel, Arakawa. California—the Merricks, Biolos, Patterson, Skip Frye, Shawn Stüssy, Doc Lausch. Maybe even Oregon to beg for an audience with Gerry Lopez.
“I’ve photographed less than a quarter of who I want,” he says. “I had this big list of important shapers. Arrogantly, or naively, I thought I could do a book in a couple of years. Now, it’s become a lifetime body of work.”
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