The photographic ace Domenic Mosqueira and his rise to the top of the game… 

When the Hawaiian two-time world champ John John Florence flies into Tahiti to hammer a Big South, the photographer he’ll gift his image to is the Mexican-born former Versace model Domenic Mosqueira.

“When I see his name I feel adrenalin,” says Dom, “’cause as soon as he calls, it’s go-time. He’s always excited to surf and you know you’re going to have your hands full for a week. It’s exciting and motivating to have that much talent and you don’t want to let him down. It lights a fire under your ass.”

Dom, who is scratching forty now, ain’t one to boast and if you ask him why he thinks John has made him his number one shooter in Tahiti, he says, “I think that I’m discreet. I don’t make too much of a fuss and I respect what he wants to do with the images.”

In this video, we get a little peek behind the curtain of Dom’s world, life at the end of the road and shooting tow swells intent on compressing a man into the famously shallow coral that gives the joint its absurdity.

A lesson in persistence.

"We love that feeling of going back to that moment and then freezing it, observing it."

The world tour in the eighties was a real manure-and-bruises circuit, filled with cutthroat savages, immoral buffoons and with the requisite sex-pot distractions.

Much brutal womb sweeping, by all accounts.

The Australian Tom Carroll, who would win two world titles and three Pipe Masters, was a rare gem in that crowd, looking like a quizzical Botticelli nymph but equipped with the intellectual heft you’d expect from the son of a one of Australia’s greatest newspaper editors. 

With single-lens-reflex cameras bought at inflated prices from master photographer Jeff Hornbaker, Tom used the viewfinder as a way of “sitting back from the world and slowing it down.”

This lovingly produced documentary records Tom’s thoughts on the process and the route to his first exhibition, which also includes a photograph of his older brother, back when he was a ravishing blond.