In December 1979, when he was only 19, the young photographer Jimmy Metyko arrived in Santa Barbara from Texas. The other boys in California were sun-bleached and wore flip-flops, but he favored belted pants and tassel loafers. Metyko had been a professional surfer on the golden Texas coast. More importantly, he’d studied photographs by Art Brewer, Jeff Divine, and Larry Moore.
Metyko had traveled to California to capture one subject: Tommy Curren, a 15-year-old surfer whose crisp, lightning-fast maneuvers had made him a rising champion. He found Curren on the beach at Rincon del Mar, dressed in a red-and-blue neoprene and riding a short twin-fin surfboard in his nonchalant fashion. Over the next few months, Metyko would spend time at the beach photographing the phenom.
“Back when I was just pointing and shooting at anyone on a good wave, I unwittingly managed to capture an impressive array of some of Rincon’s most respected locals,” Metyko writes in his new book, Shaping Surf History, “sometimes more than one in the same show.”
Central to the story is Al Merrick, who was a 36-year-old board-maker. From his shaping room near the Lobster House, Merrick was turning out smaller, more versatile iterations than the industry standard. Curren tested the boards, taking them to the limit. Together, the two men redefined the sport.
“Back when I was just pointing and shooting at anyone on a good wave, I unwittingly managed to capture an impressive array of … locals.”
It didn’t take the crew long to befriend Metyko. He became a mainstay with all the teens—Curren, Sam George, Jamie Brisick—and shot them in the water with 35-mm. film. “We were stoked to have him,” Curren writes. “We were stoked to have his documentation.”
Then “one day, completely out of the blue,” Metyko writes, “I was delivered a postcard, handwritten by [Art] Brewer himself, informing me that they needed black-and-white images of Al Merrick ASAP.” Metyko would become a regular contributor to Surfer magazine.
This new 300-page book of Metyko’s photographs chronicles the group’s adventures in glorious color. Wetsuits drying on the top of a beat-up old Buick, dead great whites getting carted off beaches, Merrick making surfboards in his atelier—images like these are paired with sensational shots of cutbacks, foam climbs, and, of course, tube rides. —Elena Clavarino
Shaping Surf History: Tom Curren and Al Merrick, California 1980–1983, by Jimmy Metyko, is out now from Rizzoli
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air mail
