.jpg)
A photo in Gabriella Angotti-Jones’s new book, I Just Wanna Surf, shows two women in bathing suits with surfboards in tow standing on a beach as their eyes fixate on the ocean. The gently blurred shot, captured on film, is covered in polka dot-like saltwater abrasions, a result of water seeping through the camera’s outer shell. The image is far removed from the impeccably sharp and retouched action shots of “barreling” surfers—mostly white men—that have flooded the pages of surfing magazines and fashion campaigns for decades and shaped the sport’s image in popular culture.
“I just completely let the experience happen to me and photographed what I was truly feeling and experiencing at the moment,” says Angotti-Jones.
Published by Mass Books, the photo book documents the simple pleasures of Black women and non-binary surfers enjoying surfing and each other’s company. Each picture drips with raw emotion and authenticity—a young surfer in a wetsuit puts on sunscreen, a woman rests on a floating surfboard in the ocean with her face down, and a girl screams underwater. An ode to Y2K-era magazines and zines that the Los Angeles-based photographer was “obsessed” with but never saw herself represented in as a child, the photos often overlap and are accompanied by diary-like entries, in which Angotti-Jones recounts with vulnerability her own experiences as a Black surfer dealing with depression.
I Just Wanna Surf is a snapshot of the modern-day surfing lifestyle as it actually happens. It is an ode to friendship, community, and the pure joy of catching waves. But as much as the ocean is therapeutic and “a spiritual journey” for the 28-year-old author, she also writes about it as a source of much anxiety.
Growing up in one of the only biracial households in California’s Capistrano Beach in Orange County, a surfing mecca, she recounts seeing mostly white men and boys practicing the sport. Finally, after enduring racial microaggressions, not being able to make friends, and feeling out of place, she gave it up at age 12. “I didn’t feel like a surfer because I didn't fit the stereotype,” she writes.
.JPG)
So when she started taking photographs for the book in late 2018, she focused on people of color and non-binary surfers, an extremely underrepresented group in surfing literature—but not within its lineups. “Black people are all pretty freaking hardcore about surfing and the surfing lifestyle,” Angotti-Jones says. “Being a student of surf history and surfing in general, I knew the gaps that were there. I knew the language of the media surrounding surfing and action sports culture and also the visual language of it.”
The historical importance of her book lies not only in her choice of subject, but also in its snapshot of surfing culture at a turning point in time. In recent years, the visual narrative has very slowly shifted from the global hyper-commercialization of the sport—which is now part of the Olympics—to a more localized approach. There is a clear sign that the tides are turning, with Angotti-Jones representing a growing community of change-makers that includes Black and brown women surfers and surf shapers reclaiming the sport as their own—but most of all, keeping it real while doing so, depicting it with documentary-like candor instead of presenting the whitewashed, more widely marketed version of it.
“The majority of people [who surf] are amateurs,” she explains. “Most of us just go out to have fun and pee in our wetsuits. We’re not trying to do cutbacks on seven-, eight-, or nine-foot waves and go home. It’s a lot more fun than how it’s advertised. And it’s advertised as so sterile and white and male.”
Friendship is at the core of I Just Wanna Surf. Most of the subjects in it are the photographer’s own community caught in private moments in the water, cheering from the beach, hanging out at home in their bathing suits. Angotti-Jones admits how crucial to “finding her own value and addressing her depression” her circle of fellow surfers has been, describing them as “the backbone of her surfing life.” While surfing at its most basic may be an individual sport—it is, fundamentally, about one man or a woman riding a wave—this book is less about the act of surfing than it is about togetherness. (Or, as Angotti-Jones puts it, “[…] about the people you connect with in need, and convene with, and the community that is around it.”)
As of now, Angotti-Jones has no plans for a second edition of I Just Wanna Surf. Instead, she hopes to document the natural evolution of her friends’ lives and their relationship with the ocean. “I have this vision that we're all gonna have kids, and we're all gonna be at San Onofre one day, and it’s just going to be a beach day with a bunch of Black and brown people and our kids just running around like all the families I saw growing up doing,” she says. “And then we can start creating a surf legacy for ourselves.”
Ultimately, the beauty of Angotti-Jones’s project lies in its challenging of the established narrative in surfing by putting the spotlight on marginalized communities. By doing so, she reveals the sport’s essence, stripped of any pretense or glamor, showing it exactly as it happens in beach towns across the country, where the goal is to feel the stoke of catching a good wave regardless of body type, skin color, or gender identity. And that’s exactly how the ancient Hawaiians, who developed surfing as we know it today, intended it to be—a shared communal experience taking us one step closer to Mother Nature.