A LIFE’S WORK
The late, great surf photographer Marty Tullemans left a rich archive that celebrates the surfing life across five decades
By Tim Baker
What did you get up to in that delightful week between Christmas and New Year – a time for feasting on leftovers, watching cricket, surfing and lying on the couch?
I spent a fair chunk of it stooped over a lightbox peering through a little magnifying glass called a loupe at literally thousands of images taken by the late great surf photographer Marty Tullemans.
It is a slightly eery business, surveying the life’s work of a person who is no longer with us. Marty’s last couple of years were difficult, marred by ill-health, financial strain and a descent into dementia. His legacy, many of the defining surfing images from the early ‘70s through to the 2000s, were piled up into a variety of cardboard boxes, the kind of foam crates fresh fruit and vegetables come in and anything else he could find to hold the piles and piles of slide sheets, negatives and prints he had accumulated over five decades of surf photography.
Somehow, I’d wound up with the job of sorting through much of it to edit down a kind of “greatest hits” collection for a memorial slide night at the Surfworld surf museum on the Gold Coast, to pay tribute to this mercurial talent. Marty was a confounding character, battling bipolar disorder while trying to honour his artistic sensibilities. He’d go off his meds, trying valiantly to manage his condition with a variety of natural therapies, from meditation and yoga to herbs and supplements, reluctant to succumb to the moderating effects of the pharmaceuticals doctors prescribed.
He walked an existential tightrope, craving the highs that came with his sporadic manic episodes but terrified of the dreadful downside of tipping over into a dark world few could understand. He managed it successfully and bravely enough to document many of the great surfers of the modern era, particularly on the Gold Coast, from Michael Peterson to Mick Fanning.
Marty was always a colourful character - with his trusty van, and distinctive board and outfit in the ‘80s
When I shut myself away for a few days to pore over these boxes of images, I was transported to other worlds. The camaraderie of the ‘70s Gold Coast surf scene before crowds sullied its hallowed points. The enigmatic Michael Peterson at the peak of his powers. Rabbit Bartholomew in his full-on, posturing, world champ, Muhammed Bugs era. Exotic trips to distant shores, early missions to Lakey Peak, Sumbawa and Teahupo’o, Tahiti. A parade of largely unsung homegrown Gold Coast talents – Kevin “Snail” Charman, Jason “China” O’Connor, Bruce Lee. And the pantheon of surf legends – Occy, Slater, Luke Egan, Munga Barry, and the emergence of the second generation of Coolly Kids – Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, Dean Morrison.
I’d stumble upon a classic image from my own surfing youth – a grommet Jason Buttenshaw coolly threading a crystalline tube, Dominic “Zappa” Wibrow blasting beyond the lip, Rabbit in full animal mode pointing and screaming at the camera as he soared through a D-bah tube. And I’d just want to tell someone. Look! See what I found! It was like a treasure hunt, amid the cockroach shit and old business cards and sheets and sheets of unremarkable contest dross or stale product shoots. Like finding a needle in a haystack or panning for gold.
I don’t own a scanner so I came up with a crude way of digitising the highlights, shooting them on my iPhone, through the loupe on a lightbox. With a bit of cropping and colour adjustment some of them came up remarkably well so I started posting them on Instagram and the response was amazing. Surfers seemed to feast on these little nuggets of nostalgia, commenting on the posters they’d had stuck to their bedroom walls as grommets, their own experiences with Marty on hair-raising surf trips they’d shared.
An entire younger generation of surfers, I realised, had grown up without any awareness of the realities of pre-digital surf photography, had never seen a slide, or transparency, never peered through a loupe over a lightbox or attended a rowdy slide night, had no understanding of the constraints of manual focus and the limitations of 36 frames per roll of film. In an age when everyone’s phone makes them a photographer and every notable surfing image appears on social media within hours, if not minutes, of being taken, it is hard to fathom sending film away to be processed and not getting it back for several days.
Mango’s Super grom team - Damien Hardman, Shaun Munro, Jason Buttenshaw, Jay Brown and Nick Wood
But all these challenges make Marty’s body of work all the more remarkable, quite apart from his own personal struggles. The skill and strength he’d needed to survive as a surf photographer is difficult to fathom. There was an emotional paddle out and send off for Marty at Coolangatta on December 27, where it became apparent how many lives he’d touched. This became even more apparent when I started posting a few of his shots on social media.
The most popular post was one of the iconic shot of Coolangatta super grom Jason Buttonshaw, an image that seemed to hold a deep resonance for surfers across Australia and the world. “Great photos not only stand the rest of time but are further enhanced when they are of significant historical value. Placing this in the All Time Category!” wrote legendary surf photographer Ted Grambeau.
“That shot blew my mind as a grom,” commented leading ‘90s free surfer Brendan Margieson.
“This is what I looked at as a little kid and just wanted to be in this pic,” added former top 5 pro tour surfer Trent Munro.
It made me think, every surfer loves seeing a surf shot of themselves, and in many ways surfing photos are the currency of the surf industry. Yet the skilled practitioners who produce them, invest thousands of dollars in equipment and countless hours standing on beaches or swimming out to sharky reefs breaks, and poring over lightboxes or laptops, have always been cruelly under-valued. Marty is the second Australian surf photographer to pass away in relative poverty in the space of a couple of years, after the sad death of another Gold Coast lensman, Lee Pegus, from cancer.
Surfing photos are our shared heritage, a tangible record of our culture. When all the social media shit posting and self-promotion is forgotten, iconic surfing photos will endure. There’ll be a slide night at Surfworld to celebrate Marty’s life and legacy that will undoubtedly draw a large crowd, as there was for Lee Pegus. How about we value the rest of our great surf photographers while they are still around? Pay them for the use of their images, credit them appropriately, hell, buy them a beer if you get a chance. When you get the wave of your life you’re going to hope like hell one of them is still around to capture it.
Hey kids, the thing on the left is called a slide, or transparency and it is viewed through the thing on the right, a loupe
