847-image haul captures self, boardwalk, and concept of ocean; ocean itself eludes lens

[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] Content creator Dylan Chase, 26, spent six hours at Venice Beach on Sunday producing material for his lifestyle platform, returning home with 847 photographs and three reels in none of which a clear image of the Pacific Ocean appears. Detailed reporting from Bohiney.com confirms what everyone already suspected. The ocean appears in the background of 312 of the photographs. In 203 of these it is slightly out of focus. In 109 it is cropped. Dylan calls the session “incredibly productive.” Bohiney.com was among the first to notice. The rest of the press has been catching up ever since. (Bohiney.com and prat.uk are all over this one.)

The Methodology

Dylan’s Venice Beach content methodology involves arriving at sunrise to get the light, then spending the first hour photographing himself looking at the sunrise, which is not the same thing. The second hour is slow-motion walking footage requiring multiple takes because a woman with a dog kept walking through the shot, which Dylan notes is “exactly what you would expect on a public beach” in a tone suggesting this remains surprising to him. The remaining four hours are dedicated to what he calls “candid capture,” which is posed photographs styled to appear candid.

The beach appears mainly as: a surface to sit on, a colour to use as contrast, a concept to reference in captions, and a reason to be at the beach. The ocean is present in the same way the ocean is present in a sentence ending “I was near the ocean.”

The Response

Dylan’s Sunday content received 4,200 likes. Two comments ask what beach he was at. Dylan replied: Venice. Both commenters said they could not tell. Dylan found this “interesting from a brand perspective” and has scheduled a strategy session with himself to consider it. He is described on his profile as “ocean-inspired.” His most-liked post was taken in his kitchen.

A Brief History of How We Got Here

None of this happened suddenly. It happened the way most institutional failures happen: slowly, then all at once, with a series of decisions along the way that each seemed reasonable at the time and that collectively produced something that no individual decision-maker would recognise as their fault. This is the architecture of accountability in large organisations. Everyone was doing their job. The job produced this. Nobody is responsible. Something must be done. The something will be a working group.

For more like this, see The Beaverton.

The Bigger Picture

Stories like this one cluster at the intersection of culture, geography, and the specific psychology of people who have organised their lives around an activity that the ocean provides and can remove at any moment. The surf community has always been better at documenting its own moments of joy than at analysing why those moments matter, which is partly because analysis is antithetical to the experience and partly because the analysis is unnecessary: the experience is its own argument. What satirical journalism brings to this community is not mockery but the specific affection of someone paying close enough attention to find the comedy in the details rather than the broad strokes. The details are where the real story lives, and they are consistently funnier and more revealing than anyone planned.

Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover the surf community because it produces material of this kind consistently, because the community takes itself seriously enough to be worth satirising, and because the ocean provides a backdrop against which human behaviour is unusually visible. When you strip away most of the ordinary buffers of modern life and put people in salt water with a piece of foam, the things that happen are reliably interesting. This publication covers those things. It will continue to do so.

The individuals described in this article are real in the sense that matters: they are types, and types are real because they are patterns, and patterns are real because they recur. Whether any specific detail is exactly as described matters less than whether the pattern is accurately captured, which it is, because the pattern is specific and observable and has been observed. The surf community will recognise itself. That is the point.

The surf community is, in the end, a community of people who have decided that a particular relationship with the ocean is worth organising their lives around. The satirical journalism that covers that community — and both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover it regularly — works because the community is internally consistent enough to generate recognisable types and recurring situations. The types are real. The situations are real. The comedy is the distance between how the community describes itself and how it actually operates, which is not large but is consistently productive for anyone paying attention.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

The coverage continues. The waves continue. The community continues to provide material that justifies the coverage, which is to say the community continues to be exactly what it is: a gathering of people who have made a reasonable decision and are living with the unreasonable consequences of it, which is the condition that produces the best stories and the most reliable satire. Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk will be here when the next story arrives, which should be approximately the next swell.