A BOOK YOU NEED TO BUY: KELLY SLATER: A LIFE OF WAVES
Is there anything as captivating as an iconic creative partnership?
Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. John Steinbeck and Robert Capa. That uncle and nephew who were in LMFAO together.
And, of course, Kelly Slater and Todd Glaser. Over the past few, well, decades, Todd has captured an un-exaggerative thousands (tens of thousands?) of stunning shots of one of the most iconic surfers doing what he does best. Chances are, if you have a favourite Slater snap, then you can thank Todd for doing everything perfectly on the other side of the lens for it.
And now they’ve compiled some of the very best of the best into a hardcover book that’s a riveting, intimate compilation that covers their shared story both in and out of the water over the years. At 240 pages, Kelly Slater: A Life of Waves, is not only an absolute beast for the coffee table but also an actual museum’s worth of art.
We recently sat down for a long chat with Mr. Glasser about the book, his lifelong relationship with Kelly, photography, and more. Like the book, there’s a bit of length to it all, but it’s only filled with the best stuff. So, we’ll keep it short up top here and let you enjoy some of Todd’s unique perspective, wisdom, and stories alongside some breathtaking imagery below.
Enjoy, and don’t forget to add the book to your cart and support incredible print media projects like this while you can. However, we reckon that you won’t need much motivation after you’re done reading all of this.
Hey Todd! So, let’s start off with the easiest one here. How’d the book all come about? Is this something that’s been in your head for a minute now?
No, it was it was never planned to make a book. Or, maybe in the back of my head. Like, I've always been a really big fan of photography books and print media, whether it's going to art shows or whatever. I like to see tangible imagery, whether it's like paintings or photography. I just don't like to stare at a screen very often.
Any time you can see art on your wall, it's so much more captivating. I've always had a big collection of photography books and whenever I go to the library I have to go and see what photography books are there. So, I've always admired photography books and aspire to want to make one on my own. When I first started shooting with Kelly, I was like, “Well, I'm just going to approach this shoot like I want to. I just want to capture this moment in time as best I can. So it's not only, you know, important now, but also relevant further down the line.
So, I took a lot of inspiration from photographers who had done that before me. Specifically, rock and roll or other surf photographers and some other sports photographers who’ve dedicated their lives to the craft. And that I admired what they had done and wanted to apply it to what I was doing. So, yeah, I always just approached surfing as, like… if you're to look at surfing like a music performance, being in the water would be a band on stage. And then all those little intimate behind-the-scenes moments where all those the snapshots of life that not a lot of people get to be a part of or part of the experience. It sounds funny, but we have been shooting that way, and this is way before social media and before cell phones had cameras and stuff, so, I always just thought, “Okay, if surfing is the main stage, how do we document these little cool moments that happen in between that that no one else is aware of? But doing it in an artistic way that honours those moments without being so in your face all the time with the camera because it’s shooting surfing is so different. It's not like you're going to a stadium at a certain time and people are there. Like, when I travel with Kelly, it’s just he and I or me and my wife and his girlfriend and a very, very small crew just flying around the world chasing waves. It's not a staged performance in any way.
I mean, in a lot of ways a lineup is a lot like a stage. In most instances, there’s one focal point, and everyone’s hyper-focused on it. Then there’s the easy comparison of the crowd at one and the crowd at the other.
Yeah, like, I was just talking to a friend of mine who's been a big inspiration and he shoots a lot of band photography, but he's done a little bit of surfing. And so it's really neat to see his point of view when it comes to surfing instead of, you know, when I think of capturing these little, intimate moments behind the scenes.
Like, how cool is it? Capturing these little intimate moments behind the scenes, that is. I think about where he would be, you know, backstage capturing those moments. So, yeah, it really kind of does come full circle.
But as far as making a book, it’s really been in my head since one of the very first times we did a formal photoshoot together. We ended up capturing what I think is one of my favourite images we've ever shot together then. From that point on, Kelly was like, “You really like to swim, don't you?” And I was like, yeah, and you love to chase waves. And we literally have bonded over that since. So, it's been pretty fun, and it's been a great relationship.
Yeah, so how far ago was that? I remember reading in a very old magazine interview while prepping for this that you had your first interaction with Kelly when you were still at UCSB? You just swam up to him and asked him if he wanted a photo at Rincon and then it went on from there?
Yeah, I was a photographer in Santa Barbara and Kelly paddled by me in the lineup and we had a mutual friend, and I was like, “You mind if I snap a photo?” I only had two frames left, because I was shooting film at the time so I shot one portrait of him and that’s actually the first portrait that's next to his intro in the book. So that's the very first photo ever shot of him by me. I was like a photo shoot kid looking up to one of the heroes.
That’s where the friendship started?
It’s totally a dream come true story. And it's been an amazing adventure since then. It started as a shared passion for chasing waves and being in the water, both riding and photographing. We’ve developed a really great friendship that’s kept up together over all these years.
How’d the selection process go then? If you’ve known each other for that long I’m sure finding the “right” pictures to tell the whole story was a serious undertaking.
That was a really big challenge and that was what I struggled the most with, was trying to organise. I don't know how many thousands of digital photos and I don't know how many hundreds of rolls of film I even got together to curate this book that not only shows and celebrates Kelly and his surfing, but also I want to show different parts of my photography so it isn’t one dimensional. Like, I want to highlight my underwater photography. I want to highlight my portraiture, and I want to highlight my photojournalistic side of photography too.
And I also wanted to show different sides of Kelly that haven't necessarily been seen. What's cool about the book, I'd say close to half the images have either never been seen or never been published. So when we were to shoot with our own people, we would always hold a lot of the images, you know, in the back of our head going, “Okay, at some point we're going to do a book.”
Right next to my desk is a book that Walter Looss wrote on Michael Jordan, it's called Rare Air. Walter is a very dear friend of Kelly, and I met Walter through Kelly and actually kept in touch with Walter over the process of making this book. He was really helpful with, you know, maintaining a great story, but also making sure you get what you need to get. So we used Walter as a great role model. Danny Clinch was very inspiring as far as like those behind the scenes, little intimate moments and then a lot of surf photographers as well. As far as pulling things together, we ended up pulling together like a really good team of friends to help. Grant Ellis helped with the photo editing, and he was my first photo editor at Surfer Magazine. So, he's seen almost every one of my photos from the beginning. Even until now.
He's got a very intimate knowledge.
He does, as does Chris Malloy. So, Kelly brought Chris on because he has not only such a worldly perspective of surfing but also of Kelly. He knows Kelly better than anyone. And so it was really great to have Chris come down and he would take the train down from his house in Central California and I would pick him up and we would stay up all night for days on end just drinking coffee and talking stories about sharing the feeling of what it's like to be on the road with Kelly. What it's like to document some of these sessions. So between Chris Malloy and Grant Ellis and a designer out in New York named Mackey Saturday, the three of us all collectively were able to kind of cull these images and create a story and give pacing to the book.
Or just get a helpful, collective look at it all, too, I’m sure. Especially when you're asking friends and contemporaries and everyone else along those lines.
Yeah, I’d ask for outside help too and other opinions. Like, I would have the PDF and I would meet up and have coffee with friends. We have a good friend who's a skateboard staffer. So, I would show it to him. He doesn't know anything about surfing, he doesn't even know how to swim, and I’m like, “What do you think?” He was looking at it more from a portrait side of things and it was just, yeah, it was definitely a team effort to make it happen. My wife Jenna has a really good eye for photography too and I'll be like, “What do you think about this photo?” And she's like, I don't know. I'm like, “I swear it’s been like eight hours. I worked so hard.” But then she’d say I don't see that in the photo. So, I’m like, “You're so right.”
The other thing, too, is Kelly is an artist himself. He’s a really good photographer, and he has a strong opinion on what makes for a great image. He's been photographed so many times. He knows what he likes in photography and I always try to approach, like, if he's going to go surfing, I try to think about what board he's riding, what the swell’s doing or what the tide is doing, and how to best not only capture it, but create something together.
And clearly, this entire book was the result of this lifelong friendship. You can tell a lot of good years went into it just by looking at it, is what I mean. How long from ideation to hitting the printers did this all take?
Well, every time we shot together I was always in the back of my head saying, “We're going to make a book. We got to make a book.” And I mentioned it to Kelly and it's like, yeah, we got it. We don’t really know when I have time and he was like let's just keep shooting, let's just keep shooting. And what's funny is when we sent the book to prep, I was going through LAX on my way to the chase a swell with Kelly. So I was on the phone with the printer, like, “Okay, let's print.” We're on our way to Fiji and we have this book made and we're still we're still chasing waves and telling stories and exploring.
So, coming up with a timeline is challenging but that was when the world shut down and slowed down in 2020 and I had some time to finally sit at home and go, “We have a lot here, so let's start digging into it.” And I spent probably about a year and a half going through my photos and started to organise things and organise my thoughts. And then in about 2022, after about a year and a half or so, I showed Kelly kind of a one sheet. I was, like, “What do you think about doing this as a book? And he's like, “I love it! Let's call Chris because Chris is such a creative and he's so talented.” And then I called Grant because I knew I needed help on my end as well, just to organise my thoughts and organise the inventory. So, I guess from the initial idea of organising the images around 2020 we went to print in June of this year. So, for about four years, three-and-a-half years or so. But the actual designing and the creating the pacing of the book was probably about a year.
And from the sounds of things you’re still traveling, shooting, and surfing. So, the next book isn’t something that’s another ten years or whatever down the line then, is it?
Yeah, who knows? I mean, it's funny, since we’ve pushed print on the book, we've been to Fiji twice and Tahiti, and we're still shooting quite a bit. We're still chasing waves. I showed Kelly the physical book for the first time a couple of days ago and you have this weird feeling. Like, you're holding this book and thinking, “This is so cool. But this isn't the end.” This is just a chapter of our lives. And it's a great way to celebrate those moments and curate them but we're still chasing waves and taking photos and having a good time. Yeah, it's not the end.
Do any of the shots in particular stand out for some reason that may not be clear to the reader right off the bat? For example, I’m looking at this shot of Kelly at Soupbowl and his arm is just up in full elation as an empty screamer passes by and I know that stoke is so genuine just because he’s always talked about how that’s one of his favourite waves on the planet.
That was just last year! It was so cool because there are certain waves that Kelly loves. Like, he’s obsessed with. There are a few waves where it’s a drop everything you go if it’s on type of thing. That's what's so unique is a lot of these swell chases are, like, you get a call at seven in the morning and it's like, “Okay, the flight leaves at four! Can you make it? Let's go.” And you're just, like, yep, we're on a plane! We're going.
Kelly even gave me the nickname pre-paranoid because I have all my stuff always organised and dialed just in case. But I do that because I love what we do. I also never want to be the one that goes, “Oh, sorry, I can’t. My stuff all over the place.” I like to keep myself pretty organised just in case these opportunities come up. And, as history has proven, they come up pretty regularly. I never want to be the one who's going to slow the process or mess things up because I don't know where my lens is or I don't know where my batteries are. So, yeah, there's definitely been a good ten years where my bags are always packed.
Now are there any secret shots in there maybe with Kelly taking a spot behind the lens?
There's one shot in the acknowledgements that he shot of me surfing. That was the very first night that there were lights on at the wave pool. We had eight lights on Cherrypickers, and after every wave, we got on a radio and tried to figure out what the best lighting pattern was to set up stadium lighting. And so in one of the early pages of the book, there's a photo of him doing the turn and that night it was just Kelly and I in the pool from about 10 at night to 1 in the morning.
So, he was surfing and I was shooting. But then on the very last wave, he's like, you got to catch one. And so he took the camera and I surfed and then he shot that. I'm telling you, man, he's a really good photographer!
He scored you a cover shot!
And then the other thing that's really neat, too, is we have this really amazing foreword by Eddie Vedder and Eddie… we asked Eddie if he would consider writing a foreword. And he was like, “For you guys? Yeah, let's do it.” We knew he was busy and he had a new album coming out. He was about to go on tour, but every week I would get a text from him that was like, “It’s coming! I’m working on it, it’s coming!” Then I got a phone call, and this was days before we went to print, and I was actually in the studio doing a shoot and I looked at my phone because I forgot to turn my phone off. But Eddie was calling so I got on the phone and ran out the studio as the client was, like, “What are you doing?” Eddie was, like, “I’m so sorry. What's your address?” So I sent him my address and we talked for a minute and then the next morning I got a package from FedEx and it was a box and he had handwritten eight pages. He had handwritten the foreword!
He’s also a really good surfer and he's just such a kind guy. It was so special that he wanted to participate and believed in our book and believed in us. Yeah, this is a dream project for me. I was just talking to Kelly before I jumped on the call with you and we’re both really, really stoked on how it came out. For me, this is a big part of my life's work. And, for him, it's a big part of his. It's weird to be reflective, but at the same time, it's also awesome to acknowledge what we've done and continue to keep doing too.
What I love about the whole book as well is it really isn’t one-dimensional. Not that that was a worry by any means. But, you know, you have Eddie Vedder writing notes and surfing, Kelly taking shots, and everything else. It’s very dynamic.
Actually, you were talking about different photographers who were inspiring, and Anton Corbijn (ED NOTE: Anton actually shot Nick Cave for Issue 33 of Monster Children) is a huge inspiration. I don't know him personally, but I'm a huge fan of his and the way that he sees the world.
On the note of other, older photographers, how often do you find yourself bouncing ideas off people outside of surfing or taking inspiration from outside of surfing? For example, I’ve always looked at a lot of traditional sports writing, particularly soccer or football writing when I approach surfing because while it’s completely different from one another, it has a lot more similarities than you’d think.
When it comes to photographing Kelly, if we are at an event, I'm not necessarily trying to capture every moment of the event. I'm trying to capture it from one point of view. With soccer, for example, a lot of soccer photographers don't get to go onto the field or they're just on the sidelines of the field, but they don't have a personal relationship with the subjects. Whereas if you were to take an approach like what you're talking about, I think I'm the guy that’s, like, you know, sharing a room in the car, going to the locker room, going out on the field, and shooting the event. Then, after the event, you go to dinner afterwards you take a couple of photos and you hang out. I try to really tell the whole story from sun up to sun down and not just these little bits and pieces and highlights.
But, yeah, with other photographers, in San Diego, there are a couple of friends that live nearby who are great photographers who shoot skating or other sports but don’t shoot surfing. So, they have such a different point of view when you see photography that it's really great to get feedback from guys like that, just to have a different perspective. Whereas in the surf world, if you show a photo to another surf photographer, they go, “Oh that’s great!” Or, “Oh my gosh, you guys photographed Kelly?” But I’m, like, okay, how does the rest of the world see these images and how can we make the best images we can? Not necessarily the best surf images, right?
Well, it looks like it turned out beautifully. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of it. Thank you so much for chatting Todd!
You too!
You can buy Kelly Slater: A Life Of Waves from Rizzoli right here.