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Matinee: 'The Life Story of Doc Ball'
15 July 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 509th in our series of Saturday matinees today: The Life Story of Doc Ball.
This 3:18 trailer for the 54-minute movie of the same name that has been appearing on PBS stations recently tells the story of Doc Ball, the Southern California dentist who documented the history of surfing as it developed on the West coast in the 1930s and 1940s.
That documentation was in the form of photography and some 16mm movies as well.
He got started in photography with a kids' camera he would take on bike hikes everywhere he went when he was eight years old.
But in 1926 when he was 19, he started using a Kodak Autograpahic camera he had acquired from a woman who worked as an office assistant at his father's dental practice. "She didn't want it anymore, so she gave it to my dad and he gave it to me. I took that down to the beach there and when I went to school," Ball remembered in a piece by Malcolm Gault-Williams.
He used the Autographic to shoot surfers at the Palos Verdes Cove "where I carried it in my teeth with a towel around my neck, getting drowned and everything."
By the time he was 30, he was well established as a dedicated surfing photographer. By then he was a dentist himself, often putting up an "Out Surfing" sign on the door when he didn't have patients for a couple of hours.
In exchange for some dental work, he acquired a Graflex D that shot 3.25x4.25-inch film and let him change lenses.
"I traded the chief of photography in the Los Angeles fire department arson squad for one of my Graflex cameras," Doc told Gary. "I made him a three-unit gold inlaid bridge," in exchange.
But shooting sheet film in the water provided a new challenge. Keeping the film dry. So Ball built a waterproof housing for it, which he called a "water box." He explained, "You could open it up and make your shot and then shut it up real quick and it didn't get all wet." Doc laughed. "That thing really did work. I got some terrific shots with it."
In the clip below, California Surf Museum historian Jane Schmauss describes the importance Doc Ball's underwater camera had in revolutionizing surfing photography:
Ball learned to surf on a borrowed 10-foot redwood board before he built his own with an adze. When hollowed-out boards became the rage, he moved to The Wonder Board, which he used for much of the 1930s and into the 1940s. He then used a paddleboard until he traded it for a skateboard. "Dog-gone-it, I did the worst thing I've ever done when I traded my paddleboard," he said.
His images were widely published by the mid-1940s in National Geographic (September 1944), Life, Encyclopedia Britannica (1952), photography magazines, news magazines, art galleries and newspapers like the Los Angeles Times.
He also published the classic California Surfriders 1946 in a limited edition of 510 for $7.25 a copy.
You can watch John Grannis leaf through an album of Ball's images preserved at the Grannis Archive, which includes over 100,000 original photographs, in this 3:05 video:
The prints are all that remain of his work. A flood swept away his negatives and archives in 1964. But his work of over 900 images was preserved in the prints he had given away or sold for a dollar to cover his material costs.
Ball was still surfing shortly up to the time of his passing. But mostly he skateboarded. "That's how I stay in shape," he said. "You gotta keep your reflexes sharpened up. That's one of the best ways to find out how old you're getting."
John Heath "Doc" Ball passed away on Dec. 5, 2001. He was 94.