Magazine founder and surfer Joran Briand puts it simply: »West is the Best offers an experience of surfing through tale and travel.« For this third edition, they booked a ticket for Mexico, »a country where surfing presents a conquest,« he says. »And yet, underneath its rigorous facade, the Pacific coast divulges ample surprises for those knowledgeable enough to seize them. This is the case for all the creative women and men to whom this edition gives voice.« French designer Joran Briand tells us more about this newly-launched magazine, made with love along the Pacific coast this past winter.

Every two years, the Paris-based Studio Briand & Berthereau looks for creators, artists and entrepreneurs passionate about the ocean and fascinated by surfing. »Whether they’re designers, architects, or stylists, their testimonials serve as sources of inspiration. From Puerto Escondido to Costa Careyes and in passing by Zihuatanejo, they learned resilience in order to create tailor-made lifestyles where work and pleasure are one in the same,« he explains. »Their lives orbit around surfing in just a balance between hedonism and spirituality, and in the heart the Third-Place – and in their image – ecosystems open allowing us to dream together. They share their backgrounds and projects with a single, yet elegant, motto: work with passion, but with your feet in the sand. In Mexico, some utopias have become realities.«

After a first volume focused on California, out in 2013, and a second edition created about France launched in 2016, the publisher Pyramid offered to present West is the Best Mexico. In this third issue, Joran Briand wanted to pay tribute to women, »so rarely visible in this resolutely masculine world.« Going beyond clichés, transcending the expected from La Saladita to Costa Careyes, this new edition displays common visions able to gather a whole lifestyle, »where surfing unveils a spirituality that reconnects us to nature.«

This West is the Best 3 Mexico will be officially launched in Paris on May, 18 and in Biarritz on June 28. 

Photos: ©Joran Briand

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Photographer Tyler Haughey grew up less than a mile from the beach just outside of Asbury Park, in New Jersey. On weekends, he used to spend time at his grandparents’ beach house in Barnegat Light where started a true fascination for coastal towns and regions.

Earlier this year, New York-based photographer released his new photobook entitled Everything is Regional, a print project described as a monograph that examines the built environment of northeastern coastal towns and explores how we use, interact with, and remember places designed and known for summer recreation. 

This new body of works led Tyler to explore memory, leisure and architecture as common threads in this popular summer destination where « US Presidents have summered here, while at the same time the middle class was vacationing a short distance away. » We had a chat with Tyler to learn more about his deep connection to the Jersey Shore and evoke the dichotomy that this wildly popular and often controversial northeast region embodies.

Hi Tyler, can you tell us a bit about your background?

I grew up at the Jersey Shore, less than a mile from the beach just outside of Asbury Park. I’ve always been innately drawn to the vernacular architecture and characteristics of the state, especially along the coast. My dad was a union sign painter and artist in his own right, and I would go on drives and walks on the beach with him as a kid. He’d always be actively looking, pointing out the unique, strange things we would pass or come across, and he would ask me what I liked about this or about that, colors and logos, that kind of thing. That had a big impact on what I would become visually drawn to as I got older and really started thinking about my own interests and perspective.

You’ve been studying in Philadelphia, PA. Tell us more about your studies.

I went to Drexel University in Philadelphia, where I studied Photography and Art History. I was intuitively interested in similar subject matters and ideas as a few of the teachers there, so they were able to read that very early on and make recommendations for whose work I should be looking at and studying, which was super instrumental in my growth as a photographer. Drexel isn’t necessarily known for the arts, but their photography program is seriously top notch and on par with any other art school in the northeast.

How did you get introduced to photography?

I started taking pictures in middle school. My dad had gotten one of those really early point and shoot digital cameras in the late 90s, the ones where you had to carry a battery pack around in your pocket in order to use it, and I used to shoot photos of my friends skateboarding and fooling around. I kept an interest in it throughout high school, while also working with video. I was lucky enough to be able to pursue and study photography on a more serious level in college.

Earlier this year, you released your photobook entitled Everything is Regional. Was it a way to celebrate and pay tribute to your native Jersey Shore?

That was definitely a major reason why I started making much of the work that ended up in the book: documenting the part of the world that I’m most connected with and showing this often misrepresented place with regard and from a local’s point of view is something I’ve always been interested in. Expanding on that idea and bringing it to a larger area (the northeast) for the book, while still keeping New Jersey as its nucleus, was both challenging and important to me.

Where does the title Everything is Regional come from?

Everything Is Regional is the opening line to a poem by Robert Pinsky, a former US Poet Laureate, about his hometown, which is a few miles down the road from mine. The first two stanzas of the poem, “Long Branch, New Jersey”, are:

Everything is regional,

And this is where I was born, dear,

And conceived,

And first moved to tears,

And last irritated to the same point.

It is bounded on three sides by similar places

And on one side by vast, uncouth houses

A glum boardwalk and,

As we say, The Beach.

For the non-american, it’s important to remind that the Jersey Shore used to be a popular summer destination in the 1950s. How would you describe the northeastern coastal area?

It’s actually been a popular summer destination since the late 19th century, when train travel became accessible. With New Jersey specifically, the diversity that arises along its relatively small 130-mile coastline is amazing – from military bases and massive summer homes to untouched wildlife preservations and blue-collar beach towns. US Presidents have summered here, while at the same time the middle class was vacationing a short distance away. This dichotomy still exists today, and that juxtaposition is part of what keeps me exploring and photographing these areas. There’s a place for everybody, no matter which socioeconomic level you’re a part of.

For this new book, you’ve been combining photographs taken since 2010. What do all these photos have in common?

Though taken in different locales throughout the northeast, all of the photographs in the book examine similar themes – memory, leisure, vernacular characteristics and architecture, land-use, history, disillusionment. These are things that I’ve been exploring since I began to take photography seriously, and it was a lot of fun to go back through my work from the last eight years and see how presumably disparate images from different time periods and projects worked together.

As shown in your previous project « Ebb Tide », you seem hugely influenced by the off-season vacancy of a tourist destination. Tell us more about this specific unpopulated emptiness of the winter months that fascinates you…

This stems from growing up near the beach. The post-summer months, when the tourists have left and the area becomes quiet again, are always what you look forward to. There’s something both interesting and eerie about seeing places that were so recently bustling with life just sitting empty. They’re vacant, but still suggest a palpable recent human presence. Choosing to photograph during this time of year stems from a desire to show these places in a way that most people don’t get to see. It also allows me to strip away any distractions that might arise during the summertime.

How would you define your relationship to the ocean and water in general?

The ocean has always been in my life, and some of both my earliest and best memories involve it. If I go any substantial amount of time without seeing it, I find myself unconsciously thinking about it and being drawn to it – this has been especially true while living in New York City for the last five years and while I was at school in Philadelphia. My fiancé is from Rockaway Beach, NY, so we both have a strong connection to the water and are lucky enough to be able to go back to either of our respective hometowns when we need a fix!

What’s next for you Tyler?

I’m beginning to bounce around ideas for my next project – I’m in the research phase at the moment. I’m looking forward to seeing where that leads me and eventually getting back out there to start shooting again soon.

Discover Tyler Haughey’s work on his website.

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When I discovered Anita Conti a few years ago, her work instantly blew my mind. I remembered reading everything I could regarding her career as a photographer, explorer and as the first french female oceanographer. In the late 1920s, Anita Conti used to spend months on fishing boats, documenting fishermen’s life along the coast of Saharan Africa, Senegal, Guinea, and off the coast of Newfoundland (Canada).

Earlier this year, when I came across « Le Naufrage », a series of pictures created by Quebec-based photographer Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, I felt the same love at first sight. Both dark, poetic and dramatic, his body of work turned out to be a cry of love to the St. Lawrence River, this «  dominant element of our landscape » that connects the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. Drawing a parallel between past and present, Charles-Frédérick Ouellet tends to introduce a personal vision into a documentary approach. « Le Naufrage is a photographic investigative journey that has taken me to the hinterland where documentary photography and historical documentation converge. » 

Thus, I wanted to know more about this powerful timeless visual essay turned into a book, published by Les Éditions du Renard, that « has become a space of contemplation that opens dialogue on the representation of place and memory, the natural world, and our living past. »

Hi Charles, tell us a bit about this body of work entitled «Le Naufrage »  started in 2010…

Le Naufrage is a photographic investigative journey that has taken me to the hinterland where documentary photography and historical documentation converge. I have always been fascinated by the St. Lawrence River, which I see as something much more resonant than merely a great seaway dominating our landscape. Le Naufrage is but one part of a larger project in which I explore the iconic river as a unifying force that binds together the traditions that gave birth to and have always shaped Canada society. My work takes inspiration from myriad sources—exploration narratives, sailor’s legends, and the work of the navigators and oceanographers who travel the St. Lawrence—and the book has become a space of contemplation that opens dialogue on the representation of place and memory, the natural world, and our living past.

How would you describe your pictures from Le Naufrage?

First, this title was chosen for its poetic echo. I feel the word itself represents, in perfect balance, the tension between the sublime force of nature and the history of men at sea.

My book presents a personal vision of the St. Lawrence steeped in the river’s cultural heritage and folklore. Ranging from gritty realism to oniric impressionism, the images gathered all bear the impress of the awesome force of the natural world. This body of photographs is supplemented by others taken on land, along the Gaspé and North Shore coastlines, depicting the sites of shipwrecks that bear the invisible scars of the past. This experience didn’t change my perception, but it made me understand the vastitude, the strength of the Saint-Lawrence river as well as it’s vulnerability. Although fishermen are men of few words, they teach you a great deal about humility. 

Fishermen seem to be the heart of your work today. Over the years, what did catch your eyes as a photographer working on boats?

For years, my work has explored the figure of the fisherman as a symbol of our collective origins. Working on fishing boats, exposed to the weather, these men labour in silence. Over time I began to see their world, through their eyes; an elemental environment of coastline, horizon, sea, wind, and sky. As if of their own volition, my photographs taken on the water naturally slip away from the discursive subject to fuse into more abstract seascapes. The Saint-Lawrence river covers a vast area and different realities. Although I photograph fishermen from different provinces as far as Nova-Scotia, I decided to concentrate my project around the estuary of the Saint-Lawrence river. This project aimed to bring together past and present by creating a dialogue between landscape that bear the traces of shipwreck and seascape of daily life at sea. 

In which way is your work a mix between a personal vision and an investigation?

It’s definitely more a personal vision than an investigation. Nonetheless, I tend to start my project as an investigation process. Since this project has taken quite a few years to realize, a lot of things changed since the beginning. At first, the project was meant to be a photoreportage but I knew there was more to show than men working at sea. Most of the things that inspired this project were abstract such as the history of navigation and the weather condition. It become an investigation process when you trying to find a way to represent things that belong to the Hors-Champs. 

As a photographer from Quebec, what’s so special about this river?

I grew up near the Saguenay River in Quebec, Canada. I always felt that coastlines were the perfect place to experience the landscape. I guess I’m interested in waterways because they are engraved in our genes. Not so long ago, the coureurs des bois, who were mostly French-Canadian and mixed blood, were sailing down the river trading European items for furs and exploring the continent. This river has played a major role in the colonization. It’s the main water way to the hinterland of the North American continent. Through the years, most of the Quebec population settled along the coast line of the Saint-Lawrence river. We shall remember, this river is a dominant element of our landscape. Quebec began as, and has remained, a seafaring society, dependent on the St. Lawrence to transport provisions, communicate, and travel. Long before European colonization took root, fishermen from Scandinavia, Basque Country, Spain, Portugal, and Saint-Malo plied their trade along our coast, harvesting the bountiful resources of the St. Lawrence Estuary. 

Tell us more about the 108-pages book you published.

This photobook is also an exploration of the narrative form itself. The physical book is designed to resemble a reference book. Its aesthetic harkens back to classical book design and adopts certain conventions of an earlier time when books were repositories of knowledge and credibility. Key features are marbled end papers, a linear structure, and page layout that recalls early scientific works. This clean design augments the force inherent in the way images unfold in sequential order. 

The content is divided into two parts. Part One, a prologue of sorts, is a series of landscapes depicting the sites of shipwrecks. It serves as a temporal marker, immersing the reader in the past from the moment they open the book. Part Two is the heart of the work: a sequence of forty images of waves, clouds, and fishermen that recalls 19^th Century marine paintings. The images in Part Two are interspersed with a short text by playwright Fabien Cloutier. 

What’s next for you this year?

At the moment, I keep working on identity symbols that inspired North American mythology. For the past few years, I have been following in the footsteps of Louis Jolliet. As the first explorer born in North America, first non-native to map the Mississippi, cartographer, royal hydrographer and coureur des bois, Jolliet is one of the greatest forgotten figures of our history. Other than that, in a couple of months, I will be over in the Basque Country and on the North-shore of Quebec and Labrador taking photographs for a project about the Basque fishermen, who settled in North America before colonization. The project is a collaborative residency between Quebec and France, where I will work with French photographer Christophe Goussard.

Discover more about Charles Frédérick-Ouellet’s work on his website.

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