Surf Contest | 
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| Creator: Ron Church
Publisher: T. Adler Books
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $26.93
You Save: $18.07 (40%)
New (21) Used (5) Collectible (1) from $20.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 766188
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 9.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 1890481505
Dewey Decimal Number: 797
EAN: 9781890481506
ASIN: 1890481505
Publication Date: September 15, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
While surfers may look more relaxed than most, and may even be more relaxed, they are not exempt from the human desire to go higher, farther and faster. As the members of the developing surfing world of the early 1960s found themselves striving to surpass one another, and looking to quantify their most accomplished riders, the first surf contests were organized. These loosely arranged affairs had, as Shirley Richards (Ron's former wife) recently remembered, silk-screened T-shirts as their prizes. Pretty innocent stuff. At 27, as Ron Church strode forcefully into this arena, he had already accomplished a great deal, first as a jet test photographer, then as an up-and-coming (and ultimately much-awarded) underwater photographer. In his ongoing quest for new material, he brought to surfing a headful of new ideas, camera angles and lighting techniques, at the very moment these earliest contests arose, at the moment that surfing, which had been considered a somewhat off-center activity, began to organize itself and enter the mainstream. Although Church only actively photographed surfing and its surrounding lifestyle for a few short years, he was there at the beginning of its transformation into something big, and, as viewers will see, his documentation of its first contests--which were at once mundane and heroic--brought surf photography to another level. All but a few of these images are previously unpublished.
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| Customer Reviews:
wave riders, moon pulls September 16, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am not an expert in the history of the surfing, nor of vintage photography, but it is difficult not to be mesmerized by the images in this book. It hearkens a now, seemingly impossible, bygone era of classic beach, effortless glamour, which --should it appear today amidst not always tasteful supposed Hawaiian printed nylon board shorts, would be lauded by the most respected sartorialists, and young mavens who scrounge vintage shops and special boutiques for dearly priced retro-style, 50's and 60's inspired swimsuits. Ron Church captures excellent characters here: there are the celebrated contestants of course, their Ann-Margret girls and the throngs of awkward, admiring, adolescents. Most of all, the images in this book stirred in me a kind of nostalgia, a longing for a time before today's unending calamities and cataclysms. Surely our planet suffered its disasters then, but it's easy with a book such as this to imagine the moon incapable of violence, providing sunkissed youths with always reliable steady shores.
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