8_country_soul
Country soul 1969 My pictures are mostly of the friends I surfed and hung around with. Even if you worked for surfing magazines (as I did from the mid-1960s), paid trips were absolutely the exception. Your own world became your subject. Photo: John Witzig
These are fifteen pictures over fifteen years – pretty much my entire “career” from start to finish.
I was losing interest towards the end, and not even a wonderful water housing to take my Nikon F2 motor drive and a 105 mm lens could rekindle it. I’d also begun to feel the imperative to actually earn some money.
In lots of ways, the pictures I took over this decade-and-a-half are simply a documentation of my own life – with all the characters, the various missteps and interesting detours. Most of the people in them were my friends, and most remain so. Forty-and-more years later, that seems pretty significant to me.
Check out John’s book, A Golden Age: Surfing’s Revolutionary 1960s and ’70s here and a gallery of his amazing work here.