On Making A Living As A Gen-Z Surf Photographer And Surviving Hyper-Rare Cancer

It’s 2022 and 19-year-old Hayden Garfield is being stuffed into the back seat of a blacked-out SUV rocketing through Big Sur, nursing a strange lump on his shin.

The Santa Barbara teenager wasn’t being kidnapped, per se, but was filming the Tan Team (Ivy Miller, Ian Crane, Noah Wegrich, and Eithan Osborne) for Stab Highway California.

Somewhere in between surfing naked in San Francisco, smoking dreadlocks, trolling tech bros, and being snuck into Irish pubs, Hayden asked his peers, “Hey guys, does this bump look normal?”

That was the end of it, Hayden thought. He just chalked it up to a skate injury and shelved it back of mind. However, far from going away, the bump looked “weirder” by the day. Eventually, Hayden told his parents and got it checked out “just in case” (Hayden’s mom is a cancer survivor herself).

They took X-rays and the doctors deemed it “totally benign”. “The doctors said everything is totally fine, it’s normal, you can leave if there if it’s not causing you any pain and you’re still super young, there’s no point in doing surgery if it’s not bothering you” Hayden recalls. “Before I left though the doctor mentioned that there’s the slimmest chance, like 0.0001% chance that it’s the bad one, but there’s only been like 100 cases ever and it doesn’t look like that one.”

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Before, during, and after these initial doctor visits though, Hayden was in the midst of one long “big break” into photography, he explains to me on a video call in his small but tidy Santa Barbara home with prints, old cameras, and books strewn about the walls behind him.

“In high school, I worked at Channel Islands and one day Morgan Maassen came in and I asked if I could interview him for a school project I was already doing on him specifically [laughs],” Hayden said. “He gave me a fake phone number, joked around, but then ultimately said he’d come to the shop and do it in person. From there he became my first mentor and now my close friend.”

Hayden soon found another mentor through that same sort of entrepreneurial courtship. “Then, a little later you guys [Stab] released an article on how to make your first million as a photographer with Ryan Miller and I just kept rereading it and rereading it,” Hayden says. “I’m like ‘who’s this Ryan guy?’, he posts pics of himself in Speedos [laughs] and has done so many amazing shoots for magazines and brands. Since I felt so new to the surf world, I sent him a DM on Instagram and asked him what his one piece of advice would be to a new photographer.”

@Badboyryry hit back, sent Hayden his number, and said, “Alright grom, text me.”

“Our friendship just came organically from there. I asked questions that I thought he’d enjoy responding to and not be like, ‘Fuck off, kid,'” Hayden says. “Then one day during the 2021/2022 winter when I was in Hawaii, Ryan called me out of the blue and just said, ‘Grom, you want to go Portugal next week for a shoot?'” Hayden explained. “I just said yes, told him I was at the Marshalls’ house [as in Jake Marshall], and he said he’d be there in two minutes. We got a poke bowl, he explained the job, and ended up paying for my flight and the whole thing and sent me Portugal that next week. I had to shoot portraits of Filipe Toledo one day and I just so scared to go up to him and stick a camera in his face. Ryan calls me and said, ‘Fucking go up to him and stick the camera in his face.’ I was starting in the deep end,” he laughs.

From there Hayden, freshly graduated from high school, became Ryan’s go-to apprentice. Ryan taught Hayden the “discipline of photography”, Hayden explains. “I learned how to open up to being uncomfortable and putting cameras in peoples’ faces and how to truly edit photos for a project. But I mostly learned how to just grind and be a part of the craziest work ethic I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

From Portugal, Hayden traveled to Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, France, and England for different gigs. At just 20, Hayden had taken a gamble on photography and it was beginning to pay dividends — until that same little bump that he discovered on Stab Highway reared its ugly little head again.

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“We ended up monitoring the lump for two years and by the end of the two years it started looking a little funky and had grown bigger,” Hayden says. “I got it removed and the doctor (who’s really cool) said, ‘Dude, I bet my house and my car that this isn’t bone cancer, but be prepared for another surgery next week, we don’t want to scare you, but be prepared.”

Then, a week passed and Hayden sat at home, nervously waiting for his phone to ring. “The doctor called me and said that it was the bad one, the bone cancer, the super rare one. It’s called Adamantinoma and it’s so rare that chemotherapy and radiation don’t work on it yet. The only option was to remove that tumor from the bone, meaning I could either take out three-quarters of the bone and let it heal or take out the entire chunk of bone, which would give it the best chance of the cancer not coming back. I figured go big or go home, and we took out the entire thing. They cut four inches of my shin bone out and replaced it with a cadaver bone and some plates.”

Worse yet, Hayds received no house or car per the doctor’s wager.

Hayden was able to get the best help possible, in part due to a GoFundMe that his mom set up for him while he was asleep in surgery. Hayden was adamant that he wanted to keep this private and not draw the attention, but mom knew better. “We met the fundraising goal and I got flooded with positive messages from friends, family, and even famous people i’ve never met before [laughs]. That support is what helped me stay optimistic and speed up my recovery I think,” Hayden says.

The biggest worry was that the cancer would have spread to his lungs already, so the doctors did numerous CT scans and injected him with radioactive dye to see whether cancer cells would still light up in the body after the cancerous tumor and adjacent bone was removed from his body.

“Every couple of months I’d go back to the doctor to see if the cancer came back and to check whether the bone was growing back or not. Luckily, there was no cancer anywhere in my body, but no healing was going on, and the bone wouldn’t grow back. They asked if I wanted to do another surgery and I decided not to and got super into hyperbaric chambers, acupuncture, red light therapy, and a bunch of crazy, ‘alternative’ treatments. At the sixth month mark, it finally began healing.”

It’s now been nine months since his diagnosis, and Hayden is now able to walk and even showed me his trusty cane through the laptop camera. He is expected to make a full recovery and is back to shooting (he just did jobs with Captain Fin and Volcom last week). They’ll monitor the bone over the next five years before they deem him good-to-go forever. “It’s gonna probably be a hassle to be out on a trip and be like, ‘Sorry guys I gotta head back for my scans now,'” Hayden laughs.

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It’s never easy asking a person what it feels like to almost die.

But Hayden was gracious about it, “During the event, I was trying to be so constantly optimistic and positive that I didn’t consider the fact that I could die. I just tried to be happy and stay entertained. But I still feel tempted to go down the dark rabbit hole and I’m still scared that the cancer will come back, that worry is always there. But I think for me, not playing the victim part and controlling the things that were in my control were the key. Trying to be persistently optimistic helped me during those moments when I thought, ‘Am I really going to die or am I gonna be fine?’ Because, to be completely honest, I was scared, I was fucking terrified.”

“I feel like I have a second chance,” Hayden says. “As scary and horrible as it was, I’m thankful for it too because I learned so much about myself and gained perspective I never would’ve gotten without this.”

Before we hung up, I had to ask him for some advice for his fellow up-and-coming Gen Z and even Gen Alpha photographers.

“The biggest thing is just finding good mentors,” says Hayden. “But it’s gotta be organic, not forced. So it’s kind of a weird thing, you’re becoming true friends with someone but they’re also your mentor, they’re helping you in your career.”

Hayden also mentioned the oft-overlooked art of editing. “Two people standing right next to each other could have very different photos depending on their camera, their lens and how they edit. We all have a different style. Photos are different than other mediums because they are open-ended, the story is sort of up to the viewer. I think it’s my job to really ‘create’ a photo, put my own touch on it, and convey whatever emotions I was feeling at that time.”

I then brought up money, the Achilles’ Heel of (almost) every surf photographer. “Surf photography is not going to be the sole income of my future. I don’t really think of myself as a surf photographer. I hope to be a sort of fine artist or something. I don’t think being a surf photographer is impossible, it just seems scarce right now to find a gig where you’re just shooting for a big surf brand and making a big income. That model just doesn’t make sense anymore. I love surfing, but I want to be a photographer, not just a surf photographer.”

“One thing I’ve learned is to just be patient. That’s the part that kids like me get scared of. Like what if you put something out there and it gets no attention and people think you suck. But, that same photo could be great four years from now, it might just be the wrong time. I just had three orders for prints today for an old photo out of nowhere. I think it just takes time for photography to pay off.”

Hayden said his focus now is on working and maintaining his health — taking the right supplements and vitamins, eating healthy, exercising, and being positive mentally. He said overcoming the mental health aspect has been the hardest but the past few weeks he’s felt better than he ever has.

And, who knows, with another iteration of Stab Highway coming this Fall, he might be getting another call from us, this time sans-lump.

You can check out Hayden’s work at his website here and reach out to him on his Instagram here.