PARADOX
Waitings, frustration, highways and cold. These elements have always been very close to me when I needed to get into the water, and for geographic reasons I’ve often been forced to put surfing in the background of my life.
I didn’t know what does it mean surfing every day till one year ago, when I decided to live some months in Canary Islands and discover the other way of living my relationship with surfing. Daily surf, perfection, hot weather. These were the everyday elements in my Canarian life, I let several months pass away before being able to understand that my wetsuit never got warm, that I could paddle into happiness everyday, that I had the possibility to try as much maneuvers as I wanted, and that finally I didn’t need to drive for hours to find a surfable wall.
When I understood that all of this was real I paradoxically got into the trap of monotony, I felt so close to a journalist of a surf magazine who wrote about his disperation: he didn’t feel the necessity of surfing anymore because the sense of duty was the main reason of all his surf sessions, and this discomfort brought him to stop surfing for several months. These were the exact emotions I felt in that moment, I was so scared of stop surfing. The ease with which I could get into the water, without needing to organise my weekend or to shift things, without preparing my stuff the night before and listen to some heavy music while driving to the sea, with the smell of wax introducing me to the seaside, all of this made everything loosing its sense.
After more than ten years spent working for every single wave and feeling every session as a Mother Nature’s present, I couldn’t get into the mentality of surfing in Canary Islands, where this sport is practiced more or less in the same way of football in my country: competitiveness everywhere, groms only concentrated to land more maneuvers on one wave, everyone trying to make money with surfing.
These concepts seemed to have traumatized my normal approach to surfing, like a freshwater fish threw into the deep Ocean. My natural habitat has always been the Mediterranean Sea, just a small lake if compared to the Atltantic Ocean, but it made me learn such a big respect for everything there‘s around surfing: from waiting waves to search for them, from abstinence to sliding on every single wave.
That’s why my photos want to be a tribute to that land which let me understand my definitive approach to surfing, the infinite beauty of the Ocean I saw everyday made me paradoxically appreciate more and more that small and choppy wave gained after having consulted different maps, drove for hours and surfed at the hundred per cent of my strenght.
Lorenzo Baronti
Shot over consecutive mornings during the long, recent run of North Coast autumn swell, In the Family of Things is Dave Rastovich in his element, doing his thing.