Coming Full Circle at the University of California San Diego

On Assignment at Eleanor Roosevelt College – University of California, San Diego

Driving into San Diego from Los Angeles, one of the first things you encounter is the University of California. If you were making that drive – say, in the 1970s like I did – you’d see William Pereira’s astounding library first, perched on a canyon above what used to be old Highway One like a newly arrived UFO. The library was the only building visible – the rest of the campus was buried deep in the eucalyptus groves that the good people from Santa Fe railroad had abandoned. It was an amazing place. It still is. I was lucky enough to graduate from UCSD and in the process, experience its unique sense of place.

A big college campus has a vibe. UCLA’s vibe is a lot like the citizens of Los Angeles – complex, spread out and easy to misunderstand. UC Irvine is open and sun-struck. The University of California San Diego  has an organic, cerebral temperament – driving into the campus for the first time can be like experiencing cutting-edge modern art: enticing, challenging and foreign all at the same time. UCSD is about architecture like no other college campus. The list of architects, designers and visionaries responsible for the UCSD vibe reads like a who’s who of post-war modernists: Moshe Safdie; Antoine Predock; Michael Rotondi; William Pereira; A. Quincy Jones.

As the campus expanded and the 21st century commenced, rock star firms like NBBJ, Gensler Design and CO Architects contributed glittering gems to the eucalyptus forest. In 2003 the Eleanor Roosevelt College was completed – it sits on the western-most part of the campus and is filled with the reflected light of the Pacific Ocean. It was designed by Moshe Safdie with his daughter’s San Diego firm – Safdie Rabines and in spite of the compact density, the college has a light, open feeling. I was hired to make this photograph by BergerABAM – the engineering firm responsible for infrastructure on this and many other Southern California projects – and this assignment brought me back to where I started as a student in the early 1970s.

Zig-Zag Modern at San Diego Gas & Electric

San Diego Gas & Electric's Energy Innovation Center, San Diego California

The architectural style we all know as Mid-Century Modern has its roots in pre-war Berlin and if you want to follow the logic backwards to the absolute beginning you’ll find Walter Gropius at the headwaters of this design idea as far back as 1919. By the 1930s the cutting edge in architecture and design was Bauhaus modern, with architectural deities Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe (among others) setting the standard for housing, furniture and factory design.

By the early 1960s the language of  Mid-Century Modern was part of everyday architectural, interior and product design with adherents, followers, copiers and flagrant plagiarists worldwide. About this time the Safeway supermarket corporation had begun using classic form follows function principles – low pitched roof, glass curtain walls – in their supermarket designs and some of the best examples of Mid-Century Modern are still functioning here, every day in California.

The new San Diego Gas & Electric Energy Innovation Center in San Diego resides in the shell of a classic Mid-Century Modern supermarket built in 1963. The original lines are clean and low-slung. The re-model, completed in January of 2012 by architects Hanna Gabriel Wells, compliments those lines with a classic zig-zag motif popular throughout the modern movement. You can see Zig-Zag Modern in Emil Praeger’s dapper outfield sun-shades at Dodger Stadium (1961), Martin Stern’s fabulous Ship’s Coffee Shops in Los Angeles (1957-61) and in Eldon Davis’ Hope International University in Fullerton (1962) – in other words, all over Southern California.

Jamie Sterling’s 10’6″ Balsa Gun

Jamie Sterling's hand-made balsa big wave board in San Diego

Balsa wood has a lighter density than cork and it grows all over the place from Brazil to Mexico. It’s straight, buoyant and is used to make beautiful surfboards – but that’s just the beginning. To make a balsa surfboard you’ll have to get the wood. It’s in Ecuador. Balsa is delicate, so you’ll need a different kind of wood – stronger, for the stringers – let’s say mahogany. That’s in Honduras. Want a little style? Add two old-growth redwood stringers to the rails. First you’ve got to find somebody to build the blank – then find a shaper who’ll work with wood and get it shaped. You’ll need to chamber the board – that means completely disassemble it, cut chambers in the center of each piece of wood and reassemble the board and fine-tune the design. How were you planning on glassing it? There’s more to it than meets the eye – it takes time at three different factories.

Robert Rudine built this blank in his Durango Colorado workshop and shipped it to San Diego where Rusty Preisendorfer and Hoy Runnels shaped it. Then he drove from Colorado to San Diego to chamber the board and rebuild it after taking it completely apart. He hand made the tool responsible for the subtle groove on along the rail line. Nose and tail blocks are laminated mango wood.

Surfers call big wave boards guns. As in rhino chasers. They’re boards for the big stuff. What you see here is a ten-foot six inch gun, designed for big waves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As in Waimea Bay, Hawaii. This winter, goofy-foot Jamie Sterling will paddle this board into absurdly huge winter surf. If you’ve never seen him surf, take a look – he’s an amazing athlete. Here’s his blog:   http://www.jamiesterling.com/

I encountered this board on its way to the glass shop. Clint Preisendorfer leaned it gently on the blank rack while I opened the roll-up door and shot it with existing light using a 40mm shift lens. What you see is an unfinished work of art.

Plus-X and Other Antiques

My 8'4" Skip Frye pin-tail - shot on Kodak Plus-X 125 - April 1975

In April of 1975 I was finishing up my photography studies at the University of California San Diego with a series of 1099 projects – photo essays. I was shooting these with a Canon F-1 on B&W film. I had in my possession a 50mm f/1.4 and a beautifully made 19mm Canon FL lens given to me by my dad’s best friend John Detra. After my my dad died, Detra, in a grand gesture, gave me an excellent Gossen Luna Pro light meter, the 19mm – my first wide-angle lens, a bag full of Tiffen filters and some strongly worded advice about shooting high-speed film (don’t fuck around – process it in Acu-Fine) and life itself (the big problem in this world is too many grown men still jacking off - to this day I’m not sure if this was a metaphor), along with a dose of his early, well-armed paranoia. I loved him. Always will.

By this time, the two worlds I was to occupy for the rest of my life were permanently joined. I grew up on the beach in Santa Monica in the 1950s rafting, surfing and taking the straight blue horizon for granted. I owned my first surfboard by December 1963 and earlier that year I’d discovered my dad’s Leica sitting unused on a closet shelf. I began shooting B&W film whenever I could charm one of my folks into processing it. I was ten or eleven. I was a photographer. And a surfer.

The first big challenge facing any young, broke photographer was how to get your film processed, proofed and printed. I found out at an early age that film labs were a sure way to have whatever you just shot ruined forever (remember, this was San Diego in the 1970s – the best film lab was 129 miles away in Hollywood) so I took a deep breath and committed. Film processing isn’t for the faint of heart – I won’t bore you with it here but there are givens – stray from them and you might as well throw your film in the trash. Water temperature, agitation, a clean drying rack and a reasonable place to store your negs all come to mind but that’s just the tip of the Eisenburg. Once you get acquainted with over-agitation and inadequately fixed negatives, there’s world of personal taste issues to get familiar with. Jeff Divine used Kodak Plus-X in the 1970s. One of my prized possessions is a beautiful sequence he shot of Gerry Lopez pulling in at Pipeline shot on Plus-X. I hated that stuff – in my hands it was temperamental and lifeless.

All this came back to me this morning – while rummaging through my 1970s files when I came across a sequence of myself holding my 8’4” Skip Frye pin-tail. I’d hung a roll of Savage 001 white paper in the shade of my garage in Pacific Beach. Open shade on Kodak Plus-X (yes, the negs were horribly flat). The board was another story entirely: hand-shaped by San Diego style master Skip Frye, the outline was no-nonsense. This was a board for fast, overhead waves. I rode it at the big reef-breaks in La Jolla and all over Baja California. Jens Herburg thought the fin was set too deep – but with the tail pulled in to a wicked pin, the fin was right where you wanted it: under your back (in my case, left) foot.

The Deal With Ocean Waves

Breaking Wave, Indian Ocean - Banyak Island, Indonesia. Fuji RDP3

Water, as it turns out, is a pretty efficient conductor of energy and you don’t have go far for a good example – walk to the end of my street on any given day and have a look at the surf. Waves in the Eastern Pacific, where I live, are caused by wind blowing across the surface of the ocean. The stretch of open ocean where it’s windy – and that area can change from day to day – is called the fetch, and wind energy is transferred to the water as the wind blows across the fetch. That’s right: every wave on every beach on earth began its life as a puff of wind in some far-off place. If you were the sort of person that found a certain security in precise definitions, you’d say: in fluid dynamics, wind generated waves are surface waves that occur on the free surface of oceans, lakes and rivers. If you were a surfer you’d say: Hey – it’s good.

In December and January, storms a thousand miles across descend from the Aleutian Islands bringing big north swells to the West Coast and California. In July and August huge Southern Hemisphere storms come out of the Roaring Forties where there is very little land and the fetch can be thousands of miles. Think about it: it’s windy in a place just southwest of Chile. Those wind-driven waves hit California, ten thousand miles away and boom – your girlfriend is looking for her bikini top. Something else to think about: there’s very little land to impede the progress of those huge Southern Hemi storms – that’s right – most of the real estate on earth is in the Northern Hemisphere.

A mysterious and beautiful thing happens to all this wild horsepower as it travels away from the storms, cyclones and chubascos that created it: the open ocean swells get organized, agree on a direction and – occasionally – become ruler straight lines that break at even intervals when they encounter shallow enough conditions. The technical term for a breaking swell is shoal but almost everybody on earth calls it surf. When an open ocean swell that’s been traveling thousands of miles encounters a sand-bar or coral reef, the top of the swell pitches out into space like a librarian tripping with an armload of books and for an instant you get to see a cross-section of the energy that traveled unseen across the world’s oceans. In the moment before the kinetic force detonates and returns to the universe, you’ll see one of natures favorite patterns: a spinning cylinder of pure energy. That almost symbolic shape is repeated everywhere – from distant galaxies to the simple spiral of a sunflower. Yes – breaking waves are beautiful. And no two are alike.

What is it About Surfboards?

In the shaping room with Hoy Runnels, June 2011

I grew up surfing in Santa Monica in the 1960s. My first surfboards were nine-foot plus, second-hand relics that I could barely get my arm around – like my aunt’s 9’2″ Dave Sweet round pin (with a three inch balsa stringer and completely round rails – that board was dangerous). My cousins left their boards in our back yard, so I had a pretty good quiver from which to base my design fantasies. That’s right – from the very beginning I’d fall asleep thinking what if the John Peck Penetrator was a pintail, or – should I take a little area off that fin? A few years later I shaped a couple of blanks in Mark Parr’s basement (to the complete horror of his mom), but my first custom order was a little Mike Perry pocket rocket that I glassed in our back yard. Mike was a shaper I met when I was fourteen at the Blue Cheer shop on Santa Monica Blvd.

There’s something attractive about surfboards that goes beyond the sport: out of the water surfboards are beautiful, tactile, sculptural. A board designed for big reef waves wouldn’t seem out of place displayed in an art gallery. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has an immaculate Hobie gun dated 1958 in its permanent collection and that seductive beauty certainly plays a huge part in the romance – but to surfers, form follows function. The real beauty lies in what a board will do – how it rides. A true surfer can pick up a board, feel the weight, volume and length and almost know what that first turn will feel like. The idea of function operates independently of visual aesthetics: any true surfer will prefer a board that works to a bright, shiny Easter-egg and a completely beat-up board can have a kind of nobility…

Walking on the beach near my house last week I saw some kids playing with a beautiful, beat-to-hell pintail gun. The deck was delaminated and the fiberglass was baked brown from being left outside season after season but the board had good bones. As I got closer I could see the distinctive Rusty label and when I turned the board over there it was, in pencil – Hoy Runnel’s elegant signature. A perfect nine-foot Hoy Runnels pintail. I couldn’t leave it alone…

Panum Crater, Mono Lake California

Obsidian Crater, Mono Lake California

As recently as a couple of hundred years ago the volcanoes surrounding Mono lake were spitting fire and molten rock. Some of that thick, slow-moving lava formed the Panum Crater on the shores of Mono Lake. The lake – if you wanted to be technical about it – is another volcanic bowl, filled with a thousand years of melted snow. But really, Mono Lake is a haunted sea. The concentration of salts and carbonates makes the water heavy and still – like oil. As you approach the lake you can feel a strange disquiet – words suddenly seem awkward, superfluous. It’s a sample of the center of the earth, brought to the surface raw and alive – and the sensation is unnerving – you’ll want to talk loudly or not at all. It’s abandoned and charged. Haunted.

I thought the last of the hard-hitting winter storms were over in April but at the crest of Panum Crater I could see a storm-front breaking over the Sierra like a huge wave. On one of the last days in May, Tioga Pass was still buried under ten feet of snow and the front-runners of the storm – as well as a biting wind – were ripping overhead. I was carrying my home-made panorama camera, a good tripod and four wide lenses in a teardrop day-pack – too heavy for a long hike but the top of the crater is less than a mile. The walk threads through glistening black obsidian, twisted into fantasy shapes, swirled with pumice and rhyolite to make pastry chef confections. It looks and feels like it was made yesterday. Forget the stately palisades of the Eastern Sierra or the clear evidence of glaciers on granite. This is knife-sharp black obsidian scattered from the force of volcanic explosions, crisp, sharp and new.

This is the view due north from Panum Crater to Mono Lake below. May 28th – about 6:30PM.

Flat Rock, Torrey Pines Beach

Flat Rock, Torrey Pines Beach, San Diego California

As the very last winter storm passed through Southern California, I hustled down the Flat Rock trail from the state park above – I had this photograph in mind. Intermittent rain with big clouds and some wind were on the menu. I was carrying tripod, pack, large format camera – the whole deal – and as the light faded I ran down most of the trail. A few days before, my friend Philipp Rittermann had nailed a lovely sun-drenched image of the cliffs and that image stayed with me as I set up. The tide was rising fast and as the sun sat on the horizon, it found a layer in the clouds that allowed just enough light.

I was born in California and since the age of thirteen or fourteen I’ve been acutely aware of the media images of sunny Malibu, lovely surfers and bright blue skies: California is for sale. But there’s another side to the west. Charles Bukowski. John Fante. Jim Morrison said: “the days are bright and filled with pain – enclose me in your gentle rain”. The California I inhabit is considerably more poignant than the well lit television version. It’s contradictory, interesting and sad in a kind of paradise gone to hell sort of way.

In The Shaping Room, 2011

Skip Frye in the shaping room 34 years later

I’ve had half a dozen Skip Frye pin-tails but the first one was the absolute best. Ron Mackey gave me the two halves of his broken  8’6″ G&S Frye and I put it back together behind the ski shop where I worked as the rental guy. Fantastic board – very forgiving but utterly sure-footed in big reef waves. Over the years I’ve collected a series of other big pins-tails and a few Frye inspired shapes by John Holly, Dennis Murphy and Rusty, but none of them could touch the magic 8’6″. It was stolen. Broke my heart.

Walking into Skip’s office and skunk-works today was enough to make my head spin: dozens of beautiful yellow pin-tails, stacked floor to ceiling. The walls are covered with framed photographs of the greats and the great scoundrels: Mike Hynson, Miki Dora… It’s like being in a church or better yet, a pin-tail museum. Today, March 28th 2011, I returned to Skip Frye’s shaping room camera in hand, thirty-four years later – this time with lights, tripod, radio slaves and an appointment to create a photograph – not a surfboard. The portrait I shot this afternoon was created with current digital equipment but it has roots in 1977 when I shot my first portrait of Skip shaping with my Canon F-1, hand-held with a 28mm f/2.8 on Ilford FP4 film.

In The Shaping Room, 1977

Skip Frye in the shaping room

By 1977 I’d graduated from college and was shooting for anybody that would pay. I was officially over the hill. I’d joined the world. I distinctly recall looking back with a little bit of regret on this day: I felt like I’d moved away from my beach roots and was traversing an unfamiliar world that made being in Skip’s shaping room some kind of sin. I was shooting Ilford FP-4 B&W film – it had an incredible latitude – but the very fact that I was thinking about the tonal response of film moved me away from the beach, my surfing friends and the guys that made my boards.

Of course, I was completely wrong. Surfing is almost a meditation that prepares you for the rest of the world. Strength, patience and the ability to read conditions are real-world skills that stay with any surfer, in the water or out.

Skip Frye was one of the last rebel souls. If you wanted a board shaped, you had to know him – his boards weren’t available in shops. His personal chop – the elegant wing design inspired by the Girl Scouts Brownie patch – was a statement of purity. It’s still that way.