Stephen Milner: A Spiritual Good Time

The source of the photographs in A Spiritual Good Time is from various surfing magazines published before 1990. The appropriated images from mass-printed surf culture is a meditation on the perpetual pursuit of pleasure. It is a blending of fear and desire within a sport that often focused on the heterosexual gaze, hyper-masculinity, localism and the gossamer tipped dream of all inclusiveness and spirituality. Through tight cropping and editing of the editorial tropes of surf photography, the images are re-contextualized into a loose narrative of the contradictory forces at play.