Photo: Morgan McGivern


Michael Halsband: A Photographer’s Odyssey
By Russell Drum
(East Hampton Star, July 29, 2004)

He had promised himself never to mix business with pleasure, to keep his fascination with surfing removed from his career as a professional photographer.

Then, Michael Halsband - whom Mick Jagger had asked to serve as the Rolling Stones’ official tour photographer on the “Tattoo You” tour in 1981-2, and who spent the next 20 years photographing fashion, the world of ballet, the sex trade, and the heady world off rock stardom - met an unassuming, 20-year-old surfer from San Diego named Joel Tudor.

A week ago in Biarritz, France, Mr. Tudor once again became the top professional longboard surfer in the world, a title he first claimed in 1998. The following year in Montauk, Mr. Halsband met the world champ through a mutual friend. The meeting spawned a five-year, around-the-world odyssey for the photographer that resulted in a 240-page collaboration called “Surf Book” due to be published in the fall by Channel Photographics.

It had been a long, nonstop haul for Mr. Halsband from when he first starting clicking at the age of 10. At 19, he was enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he was born.

He went to work for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine right out of school, and it was not long before he found himself working on a cover shot of Keith Richards for Rolling Stone magazine. The Stones tour followed, then a sub-career in fashion photography through which he mastered interior lighting techniques and the basics of portraiture.

“You couldn’t do any better than working for all the Condé Nast magazines, and doing catalogs for J. Crew and Gap,” he said of his career at the end of the 1980s, a period during which he documented the School of American Ballet, a project underwritten by the Danskin company. Next was a study in pin-up portraits of strippers and those working in the sex industry. For a year beginning in 1995, Mr. Halsband photographed the making of “Looking for Richard” a documentary by Al Pacino.

At the time of his introduction to Mr. Tudor, Mr. Halsband, who spent much of youth on the beaches of East Hampton, had viewed surfing’s elite only from the vantage of a Yankees fan viewing Derek Jeter from the bleachers. He had just come off a tour with the rock group AC/DC. “It kept me tuned up, but it was a commercial thing. I guess I was looking for a bigger growth step.”

Technically speaking, Mr. Halsband said he had begun working with a technique called “cross process,” wherein positive, slide film is run through a negative process designed for print film. The results are images that look something like old hand-painted black-and-white work, but with colors that are more electric. “I had been happy with my black-and-white work, but black-and-white was fading away.”

Clients wanted less and less of it, he said, and he had come to miss its formality. “Color can be a distraction,” Mr. Halsband said, adding that he had to “unlearn” regular color techniques in order to obtain the best of both the color and black-and-white worlds through cross processing.

But the photographer’s “bigger growth step” was not made technically. He said it was taken when he realized that Joel Tudor was looking for a growth step of his own, a way of documenting the lives of those who had shaped, and were shaping, his sport. But he wanted to do it with the help of an outsider’s perspective.

“We started talking. He knew about the Stones and Warhol. I was overqualified in a way, but didn’t have the ego. He wanted someone from the outside looking in. Others were too familiar with the subject with too many preconceived ideas. They were unable to step out.”

In some funny way, it added up. “It was not going to be about great people, but about what they had dedicated their lives to. The passion. The glow. That’s what we wanted. Surfing through the ideas of those committed to it. A collage of energy. A sequence of portraits. I walked in with a reputation, but I have a sincere love of surfing, and I felt a responsibility.”

Mr. Halsband said the Tudor project fit in with an approach to photography that had been evolving for years, a kind of Actors Studio method wherein he sought to understand his subject’s motivations as much as possible.

Mr. Halsband described Mr. Tudor as a surf hero with hero worship, a living legend bent on recognizing the legendary surfers, surfboard shapers, and cult heroes who influenced him and the sport. He said that beginning in 1999, Mr. Tudor brought him before the pantheon of surfing greats, slowly, so he could draw his own conclusions and make his own aesthetic decisions.

“Joel slowly exposed me. I saw early on that it was a never-ending story, like when you paddle out on a small day and it gets bigger and bigger. It was funny, the more notorious the people, like George Downing, Lance Carson, Miki Dora - they turned out to be the most giving, positive, and supportive. But I saw that it was Joel. He lit them up. He represents them all, has the same feelings. He’s fascinated with the mechanics of surfing and its history. All of them embraced him. I said, “That’s it, you have to be at every shoot.”

Scott Hulet, editor of Surfer’s Journal, had provided an introduction to the book, and Joel Tudor supplied context to the images - "his take on each person,” Mr. Halsband said. The project took the photographer to Australia, California, and Hawaii.

The book will be a hard act to follow, Mr. Halsband said, so hard that he decided to keep his lens on waves and the people who ride them for the foreseeable future. He said the project was every bit as engaging as touring with the Stones. “There’s another surfing book, and it won’t be salvaged images.”

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