The Beach

My parents bought me my first surfboard when I was 13, a 6’ 10” Infiniti, cerulean blue with bright yellow rails. I must have been no more than 5’ 4” at the time. Along with my half dozen friends who surfed, every weekend in the early morning, one of our parents strapped our boards to the car roof or packed them into a station wagon, and drove us the 6 miles to Will Rogers State Beach. I donned my spring suit, a long sleeve wetsuit with shorts cut above the knee and paddled out into the salty refreshment of the Pacific. The potent mix of fear and excitement, the sharpening of my instinct, and the purest joy when lifted up and carried by wave after wave, was just the tonic I needed from the awkwardness of adolescence and family dysfunction, paddling out again and again and again until just after the sun set.

In the decades since, my love of surfing and my connection to the beach has endured, while I have to admit I have since traded my board for a camera. The journey of photography has taken me around the world and in 2003 I followed a job to Miami and once again my feet landed in the sand. Between 2003 and 2007, I spent nearly every day in South Beach hanging out with surfers, models, tourists and beachgoers, who graciously allowed me to join their families and make photographs of them. In August, 2021, the resulting opus entitled 96° in the Shade was exhibited as a portfolio of 100 NFTs, selling out in three days, now a fixture in the Top 40 photographic NFT collections of all time.

The Beach is chronologically a follow up to 96° in the Shade, but in many ways a story all its own. The joy, harmony and beauty of the surfing lifestyle in all its glorious facets is explored in 500 poetic imaginations. These are not traditional photographs made with a camera and lens, but a meditation on the beauty of beach life and youth culture that is neither based in the past, present or future– more akin to a dream. Some of the work is recognizably photographic, indistinguishable from lens-based images. Others are unquestionably machine collaborations giving way to inhuman forms and compositions, contrasting and questioning our preconceptions of reality and beauty.

It is not my intention to circumvent the rigors of making photographs, for which I have, as a photographer for over 3 decades, the utmost respect and love. My investigation of synthetic photography invites the god of chance, through its algorithmic jesters, to the collaboration, to tell fantastic stories beyond the boundaries of what is possible with a camera. Unlike post-photography, this work is an extension of the photographic medium, influenced by what has been created in the past nearly two centuries with a camera– rooted in the aesthetics of what we believe to be real, yet untethered to those same conventions.

I would propose that synthetic photography does not threaten our existential need to tell the truth from the false, rather it allows us the space to consider a reality outside the boundaries of what we know– a welcome dance with a stranger. Perhaps what is most real are the products of our imaginations.

The Beach is the first in a series of synthetic photography projects re-imagining American youth culture.