Cover: Greg Noll at Waimea Bay · Photo: Beverly Noll
Hawaii has always been the spiritual home of surfing, and it is also where surf filmmaking was born. From the thundering barrels of Pipeline to the long walls of Sunset Beach and the giants of Waimea Bay, the islands gave a generation of photographers and filmmakers the ultimate canvas, and they changed the way the world saw the ocean.
Where it all began
Long before GoPros and drones, pioneering photographers and cinematographers hauled heavy cameras, tripods and long lenses to the water's edge, and sometimes into the surf itself, to capture what no single photograph could: the speed, power and grace of a surfer in harmony with the ocean. These early films were more than entertainment. They were dispatches from a world most people had never seen.
The filmmakers who defined an era
The Nalu Vault holds some of the rarest images from this era. Beverly Noll was one of the first women to photograph surfing, shooting stills, 16mm and Super 8 at Waimea Bay and across the North Shore in the 1950s and '60s, including this shot of Greg Noll at Waimea. Col. Albert Benson, a U.S. Army officer stationed at Schofield Barracks, filmed the North Shore on his 16mm Bolex from 1967 on, often right from the lineup at Pipeline, and his footage appeared in more than a dozen surf films. Phil Wilson's surf films of the 1960s round out a remarkable record of the era.
A later generation carried the torch. Herbie Fletcher's Wave Warriors series, Sonny Miller's Search films and Larry Haynes's Fluid Combustion took surf filmmaking from the North Shore to the world through the '80s, '90s and beyond, and their archives are also preserved in the Nalu Vault.
Why these archives matter
Film degrades. Videotape fails. Slides fade. Without active preservation, the visual record of this golden era could disappear for good. That's why the Nalu Film Foundation exists: to scan, digitize and protect these irreplaceable archives and make them available to future generations of surfers, historians, researchers and fans.
See it for yourself
Watch clips from the Nalu Vault, including Col. Benson's 16mm from Ala Moana Bowls in 1969, or explore all 20 collections. Every gift helps: $250 scans one 1,000-foot reel of film.