The Squan

I have surfed since I was a kid, growing up by the ocean in New Zealand. I have always been drawn to the ocean’s scale and power, and surfing teaches you humility. When you’re out there, it’s you against the ocean, and you’re not going to win. You learn to adapt, to move with it rather than fight it. To flow like water, as Bruce Lee famously put it.

I think there’s something similar in photography. Rather than impose yourself on a subject, you try to understand it, appreciate it and describe it as honestly as you can. To celebrate and amplify, rather than push against.

This series is an attempt to bring those two things together. To use photography to describe something I’ve experienced very physically: the sensation of falling into a wave, being engulfed by it and held beneath the surface. It’s a familiar part of surfing, but one that’s difficult to convey unless you have experienced it yourself.

These photographs were made during a solid swell at Manasquan Inlet, New Jersey, a place that can produce some great waves when the conditions come together. Often the best arrive in winter, when the Northeast is cold, dark and unforgiving.

The Atlantic here is a very different proposition from its Californian cousin. The water is murky, heavy and opaque, rather than that wonderful Pacific blue. I wanted the photographs to carry some of that feeling: the water thick and syrupy, dark and foreboding. Something closer to how it feels when a wave lands on your head and you’re trying to make your way back out.

-Gregory Harris