Larry Pope
William “Larry” Pope lived in two worlds: surfing and photography. While other surfing photographers were enjoying epic conditions with dramatic settings traveling the world, he had to make the best of the scenes right in front of him. Pope produced world-class images in places nobody thought possible, like Sebastian Inlet, where he could somehow capture a thin-lipped, emerald wave amid Cocoa Beach’s muddy waters.
In the late 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers was busy lengthening the jetties on the north and south sides of Sebastian Inlet in an effort to stabilize the channel. As the jetty got longer, the waves got better. The new mutant wedge eventually doubled the size of the surf, creating power that equaled that in the waves on the West Coast. “I got to watch the jetty be built stone by stone,” Pope once recalled. “Frankly, I think it saved surfing on the East Coast. It became the training ground for Mike Tabeling, Claude Codgen, Greg Loehr, Jeff Crawford, Fletcher Sharpe, Dick Pollack — all these incredible surfers. Gave them the step up to a more challenging wave. And we had it all to ourselves — a golden era. It was Camelot!”
The day that John Severson, owner of Surfer opened a package of Pope’s Sebastian Inlet slides and threw them on the light table, jaws hit the photo editing room floor. For the first time, East Coast surfers riding East Coast waves would be represented in a world-class publication. The magazine hired Pope as a staff photographer in 1970 and he got his first cover shot the following year. He began moonlighting at Dick Catri’s surfboard factory, where he excelled as a sander, producing up to 64 boards per day.
Pope is known as the “Father of East Coast Surf Photography” for his work exhibiting Sebastian Inlet to the greater surfing world as mainland America’s up-and-coming hotspot in the 1960s and 70s. His tightly focused action shots showed that the off-the-grid spot could compete with challenging and notable surf zones across the globe. Fellow legendary East Coast surf photographer Dick Meseroll said, “His photos told the world that we had great waves and great surfers.”
