Legendary Surf Photographer Roasts Viral Olympics Photo
Surfing is a sport with a rich photographic history so when an image taken at the Olympics went viral last week, a couple of established surfing photographers have shared their critical views of it.
Tim McKenna, an influential action sports photographer who lives in Teahupoo, French Polynesia where the Olympics surfing event is taking place, gave an interview to Duke Surf in which he expressed his own personal reservations about the photo.
“It’s classic. It’s typical mainstream media that love kickouts [exiting a wave], the worst maneuver in surfing, the things we never show,” he says.
“So yeah, unfortunately, the most famous photo of the Olympics is going to be a photo where you don’t even see the Teahupoo wave and for me, it’s all about the wave. It’s the show, the star is the wave. In his photo, you don’t really see it.
“It’s great publicity for the Olympics and for Jerome but there are better photos out there.”
McKenna makes it clear he has no issue with photographer Jérôme Brouillet who took the photo. In fact, he actually arranged for Brouillet to work the Olympics for press agency AFP which disseminated the image to the world’s media.
However, he tells Duke Surf that he would have liked it if surfing was represented in a different way in the photo.
“I’m a little bit disappointed because it’s a tiny part of surfing. Look at Gabriel Medina’s events in the last few years, I have heaps of photos like that, everyone does,” says McKenna.
But he admits that Brouillet’s photo is “kind of special” because of the way the board appears to mirror the surfer.
“It’s a nice photo but it doesn’t represent to me the beauty of Teahupoo and the beauty of this event so hopefully there will be other images that represent this event.”
McKenna says the AFP had been looking for a viral photo of the surfing in Tahiti. The French picture agency negotiated an exclusive right for photographers to be in the water with the surfers during events.
“I’d never seen that in 30 years,” says McKenna who compared it to a photographer being on a soccer field during the game. The idea was quickly scrapped and Brouillet shot the iconic photo of Medina from a boat.
Beach Grit notes that Mckenna, who is a French-Australian photographer, has photos of Teahupoo hanging in galleries around the world and he wasn’t the only one throwing shade at the viral photo.
“Ok, a lifetime’s worth of kickout shots in a single day. Now please make it stop,” wrote the former photo editor of Surfing magazine, Jimmy Wilson.
