Endless Summer: How a Poster Shaped Surf Culture

[music] -What's unique about graphic design in California is the frontier nature of the state.

-In the 1960s, a lot is emerging that is beginning to reject traditional values in all kinds of ways.

-As kids, 18 to 25, something like that, everybody was worried about dying in Vietnam.

As we went off to college, college then was like a revolt against your parents in the post-war world, because it had the draft connected to it, and a war and all that.

On TV, we see these riots that were very subject.

All you wanted to do is just leave the post-war world and take on another world.

It wasn't necessarily that we hated our parents, but we also just had a different vision.

Then as you started to have more color emerging in the '60s, with the counterculture, there was a very liberating version of what a new world could be.

I was really seeing a culture go by the clothing, the look of it, the spirit of it, and so we were seeing the definition of the whole new different world that wasn't our parents.

It gave us the opportunity of thinking that we had really a whole new world to look at.

Then it only lasted like three, four years, then it was over.

[music] -My name is John Van Hamersveld, and I'm an artist, photographer, and designer.

-Looking at the work of John Van Hamersveld whose work is very much associated with his use of color-- -LA was this colorful place everybody had a tan and had bright colored cars and flashy clothes and it was like a TV set.

-He begins to create an aesthetic, a color palette that becomes associated with California.

-I think people who live here and are from here, and people who visit are captivated by this unique character of lighting.

-Of course, his representation of surfing, all of it, California, California, California.

-Color really, to me, came out of the surf culture.

-Being a surfer, I think about the quality of light hitting the water, and there's something that's more vibrant and almost like Day-Glo about color in California.

-Well, I went to school here.

I had two art classes per day, but really where I learned something was having a teacher who is Bernice [?]

, who worked for Disney.

She taught color and design.

I'm at Art Center College of Design during the day, for a while, and then a night, I was the art director of a magazine, Surfer magazine.

Every weekend, I would go somewhere in California to surf.

[music] -Bruce Brown in his small studio there in Dana Point is sitting at the movie hall as we come through the door, and I'm being introduced to him.

He shows me the title of the movie, the title treatment of the movie.

I will say, the film side of it.

I look at it, and I [?]

.

In my mind, I say to myself, "Well, how can I make that iconic and bring that over into Art Center into the modernist world?"

[?]

"Why don't we go down to Salt Creek and we'll take [?]

to the new [?]

that will set up a photo [?]

."

We go over there, and the photographs all set up, and we have a four-by-five camera.

A black and white photo was taken [?]

said, I have a light resolution [?]

the sun is a part of the circle, and you have two squares together.

That's a modern composition.

Taking that to Day-Glo, which is an analogous color scheme, and that's where it really became a modernist then pop art.

It became its own thing.

-Today, a lot of graphic designers are working with fonts.

They're working with pre-made letters, someone else's made letters, they're applying it to their work.

-Typography is like a puzzle.

-John Van Hamersveld was doing hand lettering.

That meant that every letter that he's doing in his posters is unique to that poster.

That's one of the advantages of working by hand and doing lettering rather than type is it's-- [music] -I mean, it's really that ironic that that little poster in Dana Point in 1964 would become an icon representing Southern California around the world.

-The Endless Summer poster is iconic about California culture, a lot of which was very narcissistic and not political, but it did reflect this notion of personal freedom.

-For me, it represents two things, this idea of the California dream, of surfing, of these beautiful summers, of this kind of freedom that becomes a mythology as well.

A lot of it had to do with a white male mythology.

While it's a beautiful dream, we've seen throughout the 1960s that that was not everybody's perfect dream.

-There are moments that have happened in California that reflect us really stepping out and doing things differently.

This was all a California thing of saying, "We're going to push the boundaries of this."

They broke down here first because the boundaries were pushed here first.

[music] -This program was made possible in part by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, LA County Department of Arts and Culture, and the California Arts Council.

[music]