
I Just Wanna Surf
- Publisher
- Mass Books
- Year
- 2022
- Specifications
- shortlisted for the Aperture / Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award
The friction of finding one's identity and community during the pandemic and the era that followed the killing of George Floyd, in a sport dominated by white men. Growing up in one of the only mixed-race Black families in a small Orange County beach town, Angotti-Jones reflects on how her early relationship with the ocean and Californian wave culture became intertwined with her identity as a Black woman.
Part album, part zine, part diary, the work challenges the traditional narrative of the sport by recording Black women and non-binary riders living that life on their own terms, inspired by the nineties and the early two-thousands. The pictures set the joy of friendship and the refuge found in the ocean's wilderness against the racial tensions at the core of the Black American experience, while her text explores her own depression and the peace brought by riding a wave.