Published by Damiani in 2022, Matthew Brookes’s Into the Wild follows a group of young surfers from Venice Beach as they move along the California coast in pursuit of waves. Living from vans and organizing their days around surfing, travel, and freedom, they form the center of a book concerned as much with a chosen way of life as with the sport itself. Brookes remains close to this itinerant community, attending to companionship, movement, and the provisional spaces made between ocean, road, and vehicle.

The photographs employ a broadly documentary approach, but naturalistic observation is interrupted by more ethereal images. That alternation gives the project a register beyond straightforward reportage: physical action and daily routine coexist with moments that convey the aspiration attached to surf culture. Brookes’s restrained style allows bodies, gestures, and coastal settings to carry the narrative without turning the surfers into emblems detached from their circumstances.

Interviews conducted by Zack Raffin add a first-person dimension. A young surfer who grew up around van culture, Raffin writes from proximity rather than as a distant commentator. His conversations place the participants’ choices and motivations beside Brookes’s photographs, establishing a productive exchange between outward observation and accounts from within the community.

Into the Wild is Brookes’s second monograph, following Les Danseurs, his portrait of Paris Opera ballet dancers. Seen alongside that earlier work, this book extends his sustained attention to bodies shaped by discipline and motion into a less formal, mobile social world. Across 144 pages and 120 illustrations, it records a specific contemporary coastal culture while preserving its mixture of labor, intimacy, idealism, and escape. For collectors interested in photographic treatments of youth, athletic movement, and self-fashioned communities, the book merits attention for the coherence of its subject and for the way photographs and testimony jointly define it.