CAPE ELIZABETH, Maine — Photographer Eugene Cole started his yearlong, beachside surfer portrait project with one simple rule to ensure it got done: Shoot first, surf later.
“Otherwise I’d just want to go surf and, you know, forget about photography,” Cole said.
The strict, self-imposed guideline helped Cole finish and print roughly three dozen portraits of surfers with their boards, all made on 8×10-inch pieces of film with a large, heavy, wooden view camera. When he was done, Cole had a small show in a Biddeford gallery, then stowed the pictures away.
That was 25 years ago.
Recently, Cole started digitizing the long-unseen negatives and posting them online. Maine’s tight-knit, old surfer community responded immediately. The throwback photos document a time when the sport was much less mainstream and far fewer surfers were catching waves on Maine’s coast. Cole has now assembled the images into a book which is getting even more attention.
“This is a stellar project and reminds me so much of my time growing up here,” one surfer from the old days wrote online.
Cole grew up in Florida but often spent family summers in Maine. After finishing art school in San Francisco, he moved to Maine permanently in the late 1990s. Upon arrival, surfing became a big part of his life. He even spent many years working partly as a surfboard repairman. It was only natural to Cole to combine his surfing with his visual art.
Though surfing is an energetic, kinetic activity, Cole’s surfer portraits are still and almost serene. Each subject stands with a surfboard, looking directly at the camera, somewhere near the water. True to Maine form, the snow is on the ground in several of them.
“I put them all in pretty much the same pose, with the beach behind them,” Cole said. “I sort of let the seasons change around them for that whole year.”
Cole said he never had to wait long on the beach with his big camera to find a subject.
“A few people say ‘no’ but I think it was mostly because they were eager to get on their way out surfing. They didn’t want to stop,” he said. “Most everyone was just like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’”
Maine surfer and photographer Gabe Bornstein is too young to have been one of Cole’s subjects 25 years ago, but he still loves the pictures.
“Surfing has become ubiquitous but it was once a fringe scene, especially here in Maine. I get a real kick out of getting a glimpse into what that community was like before I was introduced into it,” Bornstein said. “And the fact that many of his photos are in locations I frequent and surf at just makes it all the more special as a Maine surfer.”
The pictures capture subtle but obvious throwbacks to the last century. The shorts and wetsuits worn by subjects now seem a little dated, as do some of the surfboards. In one photo, a smiling woman holds a now enormous-looking video camera big enough to hold an actual videotape cassette.
The dichotomy between the energetic sport and the portraits’ laid-back vibe is part of what draws Denise Froehlich, of the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, to the pictures. The museum has multiple pieces of Cole’s work in its collection.
“It’s like how, as a surfer, he spends all his time out there on the water, looking back at land — but with these pictures, it’s the opposite, he’s on land looking back out at the water,” Froehlich said. “I think that’s pretty damn cool.”
She thinks the pictures are more than just straight documentary portraits, too. In them, Froehlich also sees the Maine surfers depicted as standing in a powerful transition zone — the beach — which separates the land from the sea. It’s a line which surfers, unlike most people, are able to cross at will, tying the wetsuit-clad humans to both the land and the sea.
Plus, Froehlich said, that beach transition line is getting more important as the climate warms, the seas flood the land and the transition zone changes.
“He documented a coastline that’s not going to exist much longer,” she said. “That’s profound.”
Cole is a little more sanguine about the project and said he’s just hoping to break even on the book sales. He’s also hoping to move ahead with other photo projects.
“I didn’t want to let the project just die off, because I knew it was good,” he said. “Now I’ve sort of finalized it, there it is, and now I can officially move on from it.”
Cole’s book, “Surf Maine: Portraits of Maine surfers 1999-2000,” is available at his web store.
