Art Brewer, who took risks photographing surfers, dies

Art Brewer, an adventurous photographer whose pictures of surfers, both on land and challenging monumental waves around the world, established him as one of the sport's most influential visual chroniclers, died Nov. 9 in Los Angeles. He was 71.

The cause was liver disease, said his wife, Kathleen (Beckner) Brewer. He had received a liver transplant in September.

Art Brewer published his first photograph in Surfer magazine in the late 1960s and quickly became the surfing world's dominant photographer for the next few years. For the next half-century, from a small boat or while treading water, wearing fins and dealing with rip currents, he showed a deft eye for lighting and framing in capturing the thrilling sights of great surfers.

Through Brewer's lens, Bruce Irons surfed into what looked like the eye of a hurricane in Indonesia; Barry Kanaiaupuni darted through Honolulu Bay in Hawaii like a speedboat, leaving a wake behind him; Shane Dorian, also in Indonesia, appeared to split the ocean; and Strider Wasilewski seemingly rode his board underwater off Oahu.

“Art had a knack for combining the atmospheric background that surfing gives you, with the sunset and waves, with an emotional appeal and a definite sense of place,” Jim Kempton, the president of the California Surf Museum, said in a phone interview.

Malcolm Lightner, who was a curator of the retrospective “Art Brewer: Surf Evolution,” at the SVA Gramercy Gallery in New York in 2012, said that Brewer developed a distinctly personal palette.

“If you look at his photographs,” he said, “there's a lot of blue, as is the nature of surf photography, but there is an infinite range of subtleties, from silver turquoise and deep, dark blues, each expressing the raw power and fickle beauty of the ocean.”

Many of his subjects were elite surfers, but Brewer's best-known subject was a hedonistic young millionaire named Bunker Spreckels. Spreckels, who was Clark Gable's stepson, became a muse to Brewer, who captured him in various poses on trips around the world, from looking dissipated after too much partying to standing on a leopard skin rug with an array of surfboards laid out before him. He died of a heart attack at 27 in 1977.

“They were like ill-fitting brothers,” said C.R. Stecyk III, who collaborated with Brewer on the book “Bunker Spreckels: Surfing's Divine

Prince of Decadence” (2007). “They were out touring the world, living a life you couldn't live. Art was an emerging documentarian at the time, and here was Bunker, whose greatgrandfather had played poker with the king of Hawaii.” (His great-grandfather Claus Spreckels was a sugar baron who provided financing to King David Kalakaua.)

Brewer told The Dana Point Times in 2016: “All he wanted me to do was to come along and take pictures. I wasn't being paid, I was just going along to take pictures. There really wasn't anything specific about it, it was a funny little show.”

Arthur Jennings Brewer was born Feb. 14, 1951, in Orange, and grew up in nearby Laguna Beach. His father, Daniel, did masonry work; his mother, Florence (Wellman) Brewer, was a bookkeeper and seamstress.

Brewer started surfing at 12 and began taking photographs a few years later when a friend with a new

Pentax camera came to surf with him.

“He asked to borrow my board and I said, `Sure,' and he goes, `You watch my camera; if you want to use it, you're more than welcome to do so,'” he recalled on the podcast “Temple of Surf” in 2021. “I shot some film, got the film back two days later from Kodak, and I knew what I wanted to do.”

He saved money to buy his own camera and quickly started sending pictures to Surfer magazine. He soon became a staff photographer, earning $500 a month, and in the 1970s he became the magazine's photo editor. In all, he said, 36 of his photographs appeared on the cover of Surfer.

“He was almost the Richard Avedon of surfing,” said Kempton, who edited the magazine in the late 1970s and early `80s and is the author of “Women on Waves” (2021). “His portraits were character studies.”

Brewer's book “Masters of Surf Photography: Art Brewer” was published in 2001.