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Work in Progress

Ron Stoner: Color and Shadow

Ron Stoner didn’t invent color surf photography, but he was the first real master of the craft. From 1965 to 1967, working as the top-billed lensman for Surfer magazine, the button-down square-jawed Stoner was untouchable – his images were cleaner, richer, brighter and better-composed than anybody else’s, and at one point Surfer published six Stoner covers in a row. He shot from land and water, did action work, portraiture, lineups, mood, detail, everything. “The best moments in a surfer’s life,” as fellow surf photography legend Art Brewer put it, “Stoner caught ‘em.”

The work was beautiful and full of poise. Stoner’s own life was anything but. He was schizophrenic and had drug problems, and the electroshock treatments he received in the late 1960s left him, as one friend recalled, “virtually catatonic.” He was done working by 1971, and was listed as a missing person in 1977. In 1994 he was declared dead.

I wrote a big feature piece on Stoner for the Surfer’s Journal in 1995, and what attracted me to his story then is even more compelling to me today: the surf version of the California dream, and its underside. Stoner was often his own worst enemy, and probably wasn’t equipped to ride out the changes and druggy swirl of the late 1960s. But the surf world – which never looked bluer, warmer or more inviting than it did in Stoner’s photographs –also didn’t treat Ron very well, and this part of the story is fascinating as well.

Meanwhile, Stoner’s work remains as gorgeous and vibrant as ever, and Surfer recently put one of his classic Hollister Ranch shots on the cover of it’s “Legends and Lore” issue.

The book I’m working on is a collaboration between Chronicle Books and Surfer, with Jeff Divine of Surfer’s Journal on as photo editor, and it will be a showcase for Stoner’s work. Many of the 125 images used in this book come from a long-lost trove of photographs discovered long after Stoner’s disappearance. My essay will be about 20,000 words. The book is hardcover, and will be out in fall 2006.