Stephan Vanfleteren’s Surf Tribe shifts the representation of surfing away from the breaking wave and toward the people who organize their lives around it. Published by Hannibal Publishers in 2018, the book considers surfing not simply as competition or recreation, but as a culture shaped by reverence for the ocean, exposure to natural force, and the private struggles carried into the water.

Vanfleteren pursued the project internationally, looking beyond the sport’s familiar American and Australian centers to photograph people living where sea and land meet. His subjects span young talents, established figures, and older legends, including competitive and free surfers. Kelly Slater, Gerry Lopez, John Florence, Mickey Munoz, Filipe Toledo, and Stephanie Gilmore appear among a much broader community. The range matters: identity is presented here as fluid and intergenerational rather than confined to a single circuit, nationality, or level of recognition.

The photographs are serene black-and-white portraits, not an inventory of maneuvers or sporting triumphs. Removed from the speed of surf photography, faces, bodies, and gestures become the primary evidence. Vanfleteren’s direct portrait style gives individual presence to each sitter while allowing repeated encounters to accumulate into a collective study. Gerry Lopez—surfer, journalist, and actor—contributes the foreword, bringing a participant’s voice into dialogue with the photographer’s view.

At 400 pages, Surf Tribe has the scope to sustain this portrait-based account across generations and geographies. The project has also been presented in exhibitions in Knokke-Heist, at Kunsthal Rotterdam, and at Gallery Kahmann in Amsterdam. For collectors of portraiture, photographic monographs, or representations of sporting subcultures, its significance lies in that combination of breadth and restraint: it records internationally known surfers alongside a wider human community, while treating the ocean less as spectacle than as the force around which that community takes shape.