Photos capturing joy and community of Black female and non-binary American surfers

Grow­ing up in Orange Coun­ty, Cal­i­for­nia, Gabriel­la Angot­ti-Jones saw her first surfer when she was around five-years-old, and picked up her first board a few years lat­er at a camp run by the famed Colap­in­to fam­i­ly in San Clemente.

It was an idyl­lic, sun­ny entry to the sea and the surf, and for the next four years the sport became a con­stant in her life, tak­ing to the beach with her friends at every oppor­tu­ni­ty. But as she grew old­er, she start­ed to become more aware of the world around her, her own place with­in it, and the dif­fi­cul­ties of grow­ing up as a Black female in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly white area.

“Me and my friends would surf and body­board pret­ty con­sis­tent­ly until I was twelve-ish, when it start­ed to get a lit­tle bit more seri­ous and peo­ple real­ly start­ed to get com­pet­i­tive. San Clemente is a very surfy town, if you’re going to surf you’re going to do it semi-pro­fes­sion­al­ly,” Angot­ti-Jones explains. ​“I start­ed to feel like I was get­ting sin­gled out in the line-up because at the time there weren’t many girls or non-male peo­ple in surf­ing, so I real­ly inter­nalised that a lot being a woman but also a young mixed-race-slash-Black girl. And I real­ly start­ed to notice how dif­fer­ent I was from every­one else.”

Whether it was being cri­tiqued and embar­rassed by adult men, or peo­ple check­ing the licence plate of her par­ents’ car to check if they were from the area, these grow­ing­ly appar­ent microag­gres­sions pushed her away from the sport that dom­i­nat­ed her younger years. As she grew old­er, she focused her ener­gies on her bur­geon­ing pho­tog­ra­phy career, even if she nev­er strayed far from the sea. ​“I took a real­ly long break, [I did] out­rig­ger – Hawai­ian canoe­ing – and I tried to learn how to scu­ba dive,” she says. ​“So I was always near water, but I nev­er real­ly liked the cul­ture of surf­ing and felt like it kind of spat me out.”

Years lat­er that aver­sion shift­ed after she com­plet­ed a pho­tog­ra­phy intern­ship at The New York Times in 2019. She had always loved sto­ry­telling, par­tic­u­lar­ly through images and visu­als, but felt detached from the pace of staffer work. ​“I was tired of just pho­tograph­ing news – [I was] feel­ing like my work wasn’t my own and I was just inter­pret­ing oth­er people’s sto­ries,” Angot­ti-Jones explains. ​“I was like ​‘fuck, I have no vision’, and my boyfriend at the time [said I] should do some­thing per­son­al, so I start­ed think­ing about how [surf­ing] nev­er real­ly left me. A cou­ple of friends were like ​‘you should pho­to­graph Black girls and non-bina­ry surfers’, and I was like ​‘oh yeah’.”

Now, her new zine-pho­to­book hybrid I Just Wan­na Surf, presents that jour­ney in print­ed form. After reach­ing out to count­less Black female and non-bina­ry surfers on Insta­gram, she trav­elled from coast-to-coast across the USA, pho­tograph­ing and cap­tur­ing what is now a bur­geon­ing com­mu­ni­ty. Shot entire­ly on film, it’s filled with joy­ous moments of her new friends surf­ing and engag­ing in wider surf cul­ture in their own ways – pad­dling out to catch a wave or nib­bling on snacks while splayed out on tow­els. With Black women and non-bina­ry peo­ple often left out of the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion, her work helps fill a gap in media and his­tor­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of beach culture.

“I’m obsessed with the Y2K, ​‘90s surf/​skate pho­tog­ra­phy aes­thet­ic – I real­ly loved Big Broth­er Mag­a­zine because it showed what the cul­ture of skate­board­ing was out­side of skate­board­ing,” she says. ​“So that’s what I real­ly want­ed to do. I want­ed to show not only my friends, but myself and oth­er peo­ple that we’re legit – we do all the same things that white and male surfers do – it’s just the cul­ture of surfing.”

The zine is a deeply per­son­al, and at times tough, read. Along­side the warm pho­tographs are diary-style entries detail­ing her expe­ri­ences and her feel­ings through­out the years. She’d strug­gled with her men­tal health, and mak­ing the project helped her to join dots and con­front some of the under­ly­ing caus­es. ​“I think it helped me process what I was going through when I was younger and that I asso­ci­at­ed a lot of racial trau­ma with that peri­od in my life, and at the same time I was able to realise how depressed I was,” she says. ​“I would embed my expe­ri­ences in my friends and my sur­round­ings as every pho­tog­ra­ph­er does, and didn’t real­ly ever address what was actu­al­ly going on with­in me – I felt like I was tak­ing real­ly super­fi­cial images of peo­ple hav­ing fun, but I was real­ly try­ing to block what I was feeling.

“So it became this big thing that I had to throw up and get out of my sys­tem,” she con­tin­ues. ​“Mak­ing zines, books, art, what­ev­er in gen­er­al is just med­i­ta­tion – it’s my sto­ry, it’s what I know.”

I Just Wan­na Surf by Gabriel­la Angot­ti-Jones is pub­lished by Mass Books

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