BUREAU SAN FRANCISCO : SURF
INTERVIEW : MATT SCHWARTZ
FICTION: SURFERS AND LOW RIDERS: "GO GO'S DROPPING IN ..."
Excerpt from Story Series by Joshua A. TRILIEGI
LINKS: SURF AND SKATE SHOPS . SCHOOLS . SUPPLIERS
BUREAU OF ARTS AND CULTURE'S BEST OF SURFING
BIRDS SURF SHED IN SAN DIEGO BIRDS SURF SHED
SAN DIEGO SURF FILM FESTIVAL 2014 S D S F F 2014NEW YORK CITY LIGHTENING BOLT LBSCUSAHERMOSA BEACH'S EDDIE TALBOT ETSURFSANTA BARBARA SURFING MUSEUM SBSMSAN FRANCISCO WISE SURFBOARDS WSSFINTERNATIONAL SURF SHOP IRELAND LAHINCH
5 Questions with Matt Schwartz
BUREAU Magazine finally caught up with Matt Schwartz recently after his busy schedule documenting several interesting projects in connection with both Surfing and Music. Matt is a photographer living in Brooklyn, New York. We admire his visual aesthetic and rapped out recently about his no nonsense approach to the Art and Craft of Fine Art Photography.
Bureau: What inspires you to create images ?
MS: I kind of have to. I come up with an idea or see someone or something beautiful and for some reason, I need to own that image forever. It is not enough for me to see something beautiful and just look at it without a camera. Everything is more vivid and alive through the lens. I am there with the person or object and become one with it. I used to lose myself by playing music, though for the past 10 years it's been photography. I once wrote in my journal "she hit pause" about a girl I met who stopped time in my life. This is what photography is to me, and where the name to my studio : She Hit Pause Studios, came from.
Bureau:You keep up an interesting catalog, but still find time to make them available and affordable. How important is it for you to be collected ?
MS: That is a great question. I have been asking myself that almost daily. I have been selling my work full time for about 10 years. I typically have been doing the selling myself, either in Brooklyn or on my site. I have never had an ego about my work, which I attribute to why it has worked. I like selling pics to people my age and younger. I like when people say " This is the first piece of real art I am buying " or telling me how happy the work makes them. I think this keeps me going more than the $ aspect. I have recently started selling more expensive limited editions to collectors. It feels a little weird selling an image for more than my car cost. I think selling affordable pics to people in their 20's and the limited editions is a good balance for me. It keeps me humble. A few weeks ago, I was selling my work and someone came up to me and said he was a big fan of my work and he wanted to meet me. I thanked him and asked him what he does. He said he played in a band. His name was Ben from Mumford and Sons. That was really rewarding.
Bureau:You have a keen ability to create another time & place with some of your process: The surfing images and the transfer prints. How much does nostalgia play into our work ? And tell us a little about that process.
MS: I definitely have a Fondness and attraction to life before computers and cell phones. Film over digital. The faster this world moves, the more I am yearning for its opposite. Lately, I've been buying vintage video games and musical instruments. There is a certain romance to a typewriter or even a notebook than writing on a computer. There is a weight to film over digital, where you cherish each image and make them count. I like rawness and messiness over polished and megapixels. Most of my work is done on polaroids and film. I use large format polaroids, pull apart the film and then rub the negatives onto watercolor paper. With all of the above said I have used digital on a few shoots for clients and see where it can be useful if a quick turnaround is needed.
Bureau:Did you go to school for Art and how important is education for Photographers.
MS: I did not go to school for art. I took one photograph class my last year. Before shooting professionally, I was setting up fashion shoots with girlfriends and just taking pics for the love of it. That is why it worked for me. I never pressed the shutter on the camera thinking that this will lead to money. It is all images that I want to exist. I am not into expensive cameras or the idea of education for photography. Everything can be learned from a book or by experimenting. The rawness and the "mistakes" are what make photography unique, not rules about composition and lighting. To me, photography is looking through the lens, finding something beautiful and pressing the button. There is no inner dialog or rules, just passion.
Bureau: What are you working on now ?
MS: I just photographed the band "Vacationer" last week, which was a lot of fun. I really like their music and the creative direction the label gave was "We don't want to give you any creative direction. We want you to do what you do" That was awesome to hear and led to a great shoot. I was hired to shoot The Wanderlust Festival in Hawaii 3 or 4 weeks ago. It was perfect for me. Surfing, yoga and music. I have three shoots from Puerto Rico that I am trying to release and then tackle the Hawaii photos. After the festival, I hung around for a week and shot some of my favorite surfing images ever taken. Today, my work was being sold at a market in the city and I met with my first photo rep and an architectural/design firm about doing the decor for a new boutique hotel they are opening. Lots of hustling. I am trying to differentiate between good stress
and bad stress. I am told I am experiencing good stress right now. I am ready to jump some levels in my career. I have sold a lot of work and still have hundreds of unreleased images. I just want to concentrate on shooting and sleeping.
SURFERS AND LOW RIDERS: "GO GO'S DROPPING IN.
FICTION
My older brother Chaz is talking Mom into letting me take a day away from school to watch the surf contest at Hermosa Beach Break Wall. I wonder what that means, were going to break a wall ? We do break it when Mom reluctantly agrees, due to my old man seconding the motion. 'The kid needs to learn how to surf, we don't want him hanging around these streets & fields for ever.' Somehow, they agree. I'm told we will be getting up at five AM. The surf journey starts early when you live inland.
We pile into someones van & are on the sand lot walking to the reef & break by sunrise. If I don't look up, its legs and feet and crotches : I'm nine, ten or eleven, the only kid in attendance. Were about to to see one of our neighbor- hood jesters steal an entire season from a bunch of internationally known pros. People are gathered in groups & huddles. A calm intelligence, mixed with a wild sense of un expectancy from the surf, which is cold and grey, is in the air. Bigsets flow in, getting larger & slanting into even more powerful faces that broaden slowly, without notice, becoming the big waves that cats from all over came hereto be a part of. These are Winter swells. Different than the smooth, silver, glassy, summer afternoons we knew so well. This is the mean, cold, sharp, kind of grey, jagged, hurtful side of mother nature. An old woman of an ocean ready to take the boys into manhood. Several little stands & tables with umbrellas & banners are blown over completely. The more concerned sponsors embarrassingly back up their entire camps. It's an outsiders nightmare & a locals home favorite kind of condition.
It doesn't take long before Go-Go, short for Geronimo, starts scheming to pull the kind of prank that makes names and legends and stories such as this one here. He's chewing on two pink chocolate sprinkled cakes, shaped like breasts. Chasing them down with several gulps of Mad Dog Twenty-twenty & a quaalude or codeine 'cause his wetsuit has a giant rip in it and he messed up his ankle the night before at Oktoberfest. Sleeping in his car in front of Millers Market until pre dawn hours. He's looking like a coyote running in the back field, while all these pros look like a bunch of rabbits, sitting, quiet. Even though they have been in the water for several heats or sessions of elimination and judgements on style, distance, etc... Go-Go's not even entered in the competition. He's simply going to jump out there and join the ranks with a wild sense of piracy that comes with years of life on the water. Like a renegade native, getting high on the water. He can't help it. Go Go's dropping in.
I have heard guys talking about my brother's either bravery or just plain crazinessin dropping in on the biggies at the break wall. But those were warm Summer swells. This was after he had dropped out to master Swami's, County Line and Horseshoe. Years before the storms took away half the beach from us forever. Back then, there were the Hawaiian transplants and Filipino's , the blonde Malibu types and then there was Bill. He was my older brothers, best friend's older brother. The first day I met him, he was shaping a board in the family garage. He was the conscious of our neighborhood. A mentor and ex football hero.
Now the word is getting and Bill is saying that Go-Go is a kook. But everyone else is goading him into it. The b level players like, Gozer, Richie and the others. " Yeah Go - Go do it." So, we're all aware that something is going to happen and all the guys that look like newscasters at the table are about to be surprised by the " Attack of the Boys from The East End " like a film at the Roadio drive-in. We had our own daredevil-jokester-madman-hero and we'd have sent him into anything, just to watch him burn, although it was his matchbook, that was always clear, so it didn't seem like anyone even thought twice about his safety, except maybe Bill.Of course , it was about the girls too. A guy like Go-Go who wasn't a pretty boy or particularly smart or wealthy could crank up his position on the charisma level. He'dbe King - for - a Day. Could maybe even shack up with a babe for a week or so aftera performance like this. A guy would build up his story, it circulated, and he'd ride it like the wave that Go-Go was hoping to catch.
There are boats at bay, in case of any emergency and the girls are all in their bikini's and cut off jeans. They must have come up from Mexico the way they look, glowing with that peach, amber glow that white girls get after a season or two on the road with surfers. The tips of their hair, the tan toes, the bright colored clothes and all the wind blown edges of their attitude. Go - Go slips away long enough for us to forget about his plan when someone at the surf officials table becomes extremely animated and upset, waiving erratically at some thing no one else can see. Another official breaks out the bull horn and starts directing the man on the break wall to , " Get away from the water. "
Go - Go continues down the wall toward the rocky point where locals, who knew the terrain, could jump off by counting the right three second interval between the breaking set and the next rising crest. But today, this was just plain fucking insane and everybody knew it. I started to get concerned. Not like Bill did, by calling him a knuckle head, but fearfulthat a bad thing could happen. And of course a bad thing could happen, that's thepoint of these manhood rituals with the sea and earth and wind and ourselves. ButGo-Go was built to do this, just like he was built to steal a police car because the cops busted up a party where he was about to get laid and it really pissed him off. Somewere not impressed, whereas we were ecstatic, I mean I was anyway. The place wasbeing robbed of it's boundaries, that was the thing. So Go-Go does a run and a jump,off the end of the concrete, over the first set of rocks and launches a toes - out - cat -like - flight over the six feet of rocks on the outer side of the break wall and into the sacred sea. Breaking several rules, disrupting the contest and banishing himself from any future competition position according to the Official California Surfing Federation handbook of 1970 - something.
But Go-Go wasn't saving for retirement, he was building up a different account of sorts and was about to hit the long shot on a late bet at roulette. Now he's out there and has to drop in on this next big set and do this thing or it'll flop and he'll have lost a chance & completely ruined an otherwise decent Winter competition. He works quick, paddling into a larger break point which can completely slam you into the rocks if your to close at drop in. By now everyone knows what's going on, all eyes are on Go - Go. People in our circle start shouting, " Go - Go you f*cker ." Others join in like fans at a Rams game or Stones concert, " Go - Gooooooooo, do it man." Finally, the war cryisheard,"G-e-r-o-n-i-m-o !" IlookupandevenBillisbeaming.Asthey all shouted into the cold, grey sea, Go - Go dropped in and it was then that I started to understand what surfing was really all about.
- ALWAYS WATCH FOR THE FLAGS AT YOUR LIFEGUARD STATION
- NEVER DISRESPECT THE LOCALS
- NEVER RUN OVER SWIMMER (S)
- COUNT SWELLS PRIOR TO ENTRY
- KNOW WHERE THE RIP TIDES ARE
- ALWAYS RESPECT MOTHER OCEAN
- SHARE THE WAVES WITH OTHERS
AD SPACE AND INTERVIEWS,PHOTOGRAPHS AND HOTSPOTS REVEALED.
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