John Witzig

TOP 40 #20 – WITZIGS – 1977 Okay, the money shot for those to whom wave quality is the only measure of worth… As it happens, I don’t agree with that method of value judgement for a moment, but at least you can see the colours of the dune vegetation in this picture… and surprisingly I waited for a goodish set. Given the acute antagonism by some towards my brother because he tried to protect the fragile natural environment at Cactus, it remains a surprise to me that the break in the bay out from Paul and Marianne’s house would seem still be called ‘Witzigs’… but the name seems to have stuck. It seemed to me that it was always a better left than a right, and I don’t recollect ‘A-frame’ having entered the surfing vocabulary by then… logical though it certainly is. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #37 – THE POINT BEFORE DAWN – early 1970s When this is the view from your surf-check point early morning, it’s an image that tends to burn its way into your brain. The little house I was building for most of the 1970s was a little way back down the road. I liked to have a look just before dawn when there were few people around. This morning there’s no reason for anyone to get up early. There’s a little size, but the swell is messy and not looking likely to improve. It IS kinda beautiful though. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #31 – CHRISTMAS DAY, HAY – 1970 Anyone who’s followed these posts of mine for a while will know that there are very few ‘selfies’ amongst them… maybe none. But before selfies, there were ‘run-into’ shots, where you set a timer on the camera, and then ran around and put yourself into the frame. They were a fun way of noting odd things that happened from time to time. I was recording life around me in the small subculture called surfing (and it WAS still small at that time). But it was also my life that I was documenting… and that of my friends. On Christmas Eve in 1970, Nigel Coates and I drove over 700 km until we found a spot near Hay in western New South Wales where we could get far enough off the road to not be rocked by the passing road trains. We made some sort of dinner, and woke up in a glade of gum trees that made a pretty nice setting for Christmas morning. Nigel and I had a brief exchange of presents and got back on the road. We were heading to Margaret River. My dog Abu was the third member of our little gang. He REALLY liked being photographed. Abu was very handsome. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #29 – BUZZY KERBOX AT HALEIWA – 1976 This first shot is, arguably, one of my favourite photographs shot with the Nikonos… and one of the last. I’d had a water housing built to take my Nikon with a motor drive and a 105 mm lens, and while I used that sporadically for the next couple of years, I never took a picture as good as the best of the Nikonos shots. I don’t think that you’d intentionally compose a picture like this one of Buzzy Kerbox with that mass of blue, and what’s meant to be the subject pushed partly out of the frame. It’s slightly weird, and I love it. I’ve waited fifty years for an art director, ANY art director, to agree with me that the first shot would make a great opening spread for a story, with the title and some text on the (blue) right hand page. And it’s never happened. I need to do it myself… The second shot of Buzzy was taken at the same time… with me looking likely to go over the falls. If that happened, I’ve managed to forget it. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #21 – WAYNE LYNCH AT BELLS – 1969 This is Wayne competing at the annual Bells contest at Easter in 1969. Wayne was making a habit of winning the juniors, and he continued that tradition on this occasion too. I had the luxury of being taken out in local surfer ‘Flossie’ Neylan’s boat in 1969, and could shoot with a longer lens from a position of comparative safety. The general risk-taking by Torquay surfers in most of their activities was such that, if you hung around with them, security would never be a given. As with the Nikonos in a different way, shooting from the boat let me place the surfer and the wave into the broader landscape… something I definitely chose to do when I could. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #4 – FRECKLES AT SPOOKY – MAY 1973 I am still slightly obsessive about running the full frame of pictures I’ve taken… following the example of my first photographic hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson. From him I also borrowed use the black edge of the film to show that it WAS the picture that I took. But… and it’s a BIG BUT… when you want a picture for the cover of a vertical format tabloid newspaper (which ‘Tracks’ was at the time), then all your principles fly straight out the window. And the fact is that this is a MUCH better picture cropped into a vertical format than it ever was full-frame. This was the cover in July 1973. Graphically it just WORKS… but I was aware of the famous Japanese print maker Hokusai’s ‘Great wave’… and the white water hanging above Freckles’ head is SO reminiscent of that work of Hokusai’s. Not present in that image, but lending an Asian feel to mine, are the wind-blown trees in the background… The London Design Museum asked to use this picture in an exhibition on surfing some years ago, and I got a puzzled email from the curator. She’d Googled ‘Freckles’ and not come up with any information. That’s still the case. Freckles’ real name was Brian Holdsworth, and arguably he should’ve been at school in Wollongong on the NSW south coast… instead he was surfing Spooky. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #16 – BOB McTAVISH AT HONOLUA BAY – 1967 I don’t have one picture that does Bob’s surfing at Honolua justice. I happen to like this first one, but Bob doesn’t. Whether there was something better in what’s been lost, I no longer know. Nat once observed about that swell at Honolua that “tracks were taken out of the curl in a way that had never been done before”. The track that Bob is taking on the second shot isn’t too different to the ones that were being taken by the Hawaiians on their pintails. He sure is close to the curl… the point of ‘Involvement’ as he and Nat defined it. As I recollect, this wave is in the Honolua finalé of my brother’s film ‘The Hot Generation’. I sent a colour transparency of this shot to ‘Surfer’ magazine in 1968, and it disappeared forever. Jeff Divine found a copy-neg of it in their files nearly 40 years later. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #36 – NAT AT HONOLUA 2 – 1967 This is yet another save by Jeff Divine – @jeffdivinephoto – who found it in the ‘Surfer’ files and sent it to me… for which I am HUGELY appreciative. This was originally a colour shot, and was run on the cover of ‘Surfer’ vol. 9, number 4 – September 1968 – cut into the shape of a V-bottom board… WAY after the V-bottoms had been discarded in Australia. I happened to be around when Nat was explaining to Taylor Jensen – @taylorjensentj – that this picture showed how Nat had transferred from one side of the V to the other… or something like that. I sort of understood what Nat was describing, but I’m afraid that my mind tends to glaze over during those sort of discussions. My questionable memory tells me that Nat broke the front of his board off at Honolua, maybe in the first day of this swell. I can certainly remember him repairing it around the tent we were squatting in, but that’s the extent of what I can remember. It was a major repair, and surely you’d think that it’d affect the balance of the board? I don’t remember any sign of that. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #34 – NAT YOUNG, BIG HONOLUA – 1967 I wasn’t interested in surfboard design in the 1960s when I was surrounded by people who were obsessed by it, and I’m less interested now. So this story isn’t going to be about that. In December 1967 I happened to be on Maui when a great swell hit Honolua Bay. Even then, a crew would arrive as soon as they knew that the swell direction was right – and ocean prediction was SO much better in Hawaii than anything I’ve ever experienced in Australia. But this time, for whatever reason, we had a couple of days of some extraordinary waves pretty much to ourselves. Nat and Bob McTavish were riding their radical and experimental V-bottom boards; George Greenough was on one of his ‘Velo’ series kneeboards; and Ted Spencer, mostly riding a board he called ‘Little Red’. To my eyes, ‘Buddy Boy’ Kahoe was the most impressive of the Hawaiian surfers… riding a Brewer pintail. The difference between Buddy Boy’s (and Reno Abellira’s) long carving tracks, and Nat’s extreme and staccato changes of direction were one story about the past and the future of surfing. It struck me, even then, as a significant moment. My brother Paul was there filming, and his footage of Honolua during that swell would make the finalé of his film ‘The Hot Generation’. When it was shown in California, it exposed American eyes for the first time to what was happening in Australia. Matt Warshaw, in his ‘Encyclopedia of Surfing’ would later write that Nat and Bob ‘turned easily and repeatedly from trough to crest in a high-performance style that set a precedent for virtually all surfing that followed’. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #5 – PARLEMENTIA, PAYS BASQUE, FRANCE – 1976 From the somewhat challenging (last week’s Sunset lineup) to the sublime, THIS is the Parlementia that I happily grew accustomed to during various stays during the 1970s. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #11 – SUNSET BEACH – 1976 From the journal I was keeping: Wednesday December 29 Still tingling with the after-effects of a wipeout at Sunset this afternoon – the inside section is operating again. It’s terrifying when it’s running – a ledging, turning-square tube. There was no way really that I should have found myself heading into it, but there I was. It stretched maybe 20 or 30 yards. I was standing straight up (in surprise I suspect) & it was all overhead. As the curl started to curve over I caught that Greenough-inspired feeling & crouched & hoped. Maybe if I’d been pointing a bit higher I would have come out of it – & it would’ve been the best tube of my life. But I wasn’t – I don’t know if I’m good enough to do things like that… but I would’ve liked to have made that tube. And instead I got annihilated. The lip smashed straight down on my head. I don’t know if I hit the board or not. After the first awful impact I went around & over the falls again. The sensation of speed through the water is still vivid. Somehow in the detachment that accompanies these moments I sort-of watched myself handle it – well not panic anyway – & eventually it just let me go & I came up… I swam to my board & paddled out again. The exhilaration stayed & the feeling that that wipeout was heavy & shit, I made it. I remember just wishing I’d made the wave. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery

TOP 40 #9 – THE LINEUP AT BELLS – 1977 These are pretty nice waves at Bells… not BIG, not great, but you’d be happy to see it when you caught your first glimpse of the coast… there’s something about the uniformity and the spacing of the lines of swell… Spectators are no longer allowed along the cliff edge amongst this fragile coastal vegetation. The twisting forms eloquently express the savage nature it endures, but we humans were efficiently destroying it. The natural amphitheatre is definitely one of the attractions about Bells as a venue for surfing contests. If you add to that the consistency of surf, and the fact that nearby Torquay transformed itself into a surfing company town, then you have an unmatched trifecta… in Australia at least. I was one of many people who regularly made the trip south over its first two decades. I was fortunate to experience the many moods of this great bit of Australia’s surfing coast. I’m not sure that I need to repeat some of the things that I did then, but those were fine times. FOR PRINTS: There’s a link to the website on my home page. johnwitzig.com.au #johnwitzig @dickersongallery #dickersongallery