LeRoy Grannis

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LeRoy 'Granny' Grannis (b. August 12, 1917 in Hermosa Beach, California) is a notable photographer. His portfolio of photography of surfing and related sea images from the 1960's enjoys a leading reputation.

1 Life
2 Bibliography
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Life

Living a beachfront childhood, his father would take him swimming and bodysurfing by the age of five. Soon, Grannis made himself a bellyboard from a piece of wood and rode it during vacations in his mother's home state of Florida. In 1931, he obtained a 6' x 2' pine board and hacked a kneeboard from it. At Hermosa Pier, stand up surfing was the rage, so he began borrowing boards until he could get his own. Later a member of the Palos Verdes Surf Club, the first of its kind in America, he struggled to balance surf time with family and work.

Unable to afford an education at UCLA during the Depression, Grannis dropped out and found work as a carpenter, junkyard de-tinner and spent some years at Standard Oil. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1943, remaining on active reserve until retiring as a major in 1977. Several fellow surf club members were employed with Pacific Bell, and Grannis joined them in 1946. He had already begun to venture into photography and several pictures were featured in photo pioneer and close friend Doc Ball's 1946 book California Surfriders. He surfed the occasional contest during the '50s, gradually settling into the role of assisting Hoppy Swarts at the controls during the early years of the United States Surfing Association. The telephone company job had given him an ulcer by 1959 and his doctor advised him to take up a hobby, and Ball suggested more serious photography.

His work soon appeared in prominent surf culture magazines of the time including Surfer, Reef and Surfing Illustrated. He quickly became one of the sport's most important documentarians. Other photographers were shooting from the water, but they were forced to return to land to reload. Grannis developed a rubber-lined box that enabled him to change film in the lineup. He spent the decade in California and Hawaii, capturing the best surfers in the world riding the best surf. He was photo editor of Surfing Illustrated and of International Surfing, which he co-founded ^[1].

He was elected to the International Surfing Hall of Fame as the number one lensman in 1966 and in 2002 was awarded SIMA's Lifetime Achievement Award. Grannis was the subject of The Surfers Journal's first ode to master photographers in 1998 with a composition entitled Photo:Grannis; his work was later featured in Stacy Peralta's 2004 award-winning documentary of the sport, Riding Giants; and most recently, LeRoy Grannis: Birth of a Culture was published as a limited-edition, signed collector's edition monograph by Taschen.

As said by Jason Borte, "Leroy Grannis wasn't the first to depict the California lifestyle with his photos. It wasn't his idea to begin shooting in the first place. His contributions to surfing photography occurred over a brief 12-year period, and he hasn't much bothered with it since 1971. Nevertheless, most of the great images from the '60s golden age of surfing, regardless of the magazine, bear the inscription "Photo: Grannis". ^[2] In 1971, fed up with increased competition for the perfect angle, Grannis quit shooting surfing and soon found himself involved in hang gliding. The sport replaced surfing in his life, and he held a brief stint as photographer for Hang Gliding magazine. Several injuries, including a badly fractured leg in 1981, caused him to find a new outlet. This time it was windsurfing. Until the late '80s, Grannis both engaged in and photographed the sport.

Living in Carlsbad, California since retiring from Pacific Bell in 1977, he and wife Katie (they married in 1939) have four children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A hardbound book of his 1960's photos, entitled Photo: Grannis, was published in 1998 by The Surfer's Journal.