Patrick Cariou | Surfers + Yes Rasta
Patrick Cariou's soulful black and white photographs exhibit his rare propensity to capture the individuality of his subjects.
Cariou's collection of surfers the world over, from the North Shore to Peru, from Tahiti to Brittany, from Long Island to Easter Island has become a classic representation of the sport. Cariou captures the world’s most famous surfing spots and masters like no other photographer has done before or since.
With bold black-and-white portraits and landscapes, Cariou illustrates the strict, separatist, jungle-dwelling, fruit-of-the-land lifestyle—popularized by reggae legends Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. In Yes Rasta—the phrase spoken by true Rastafari when greeting each other—Cariou’s direct, classical photographs reveal men whose style and attitude are as distinctive as their dreadlocks. Men who have left the modern world of Babylon in pursuit of their own independence. Men whose lives are intertwined with the tropical landscape, and whose rituals, symbols, philosophies, religion, medicine, agriculture, family structure, and remarkable strength make the definitive statement of self-reliance.