One Of Europe’s Greatest Surf Photographers, Timo Jarvinen, Passes At 60

News of Andy Irons’ death hit the Marriott in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, hard. Surfers, Rip Curl event staff and media, the whole tour basically was in a state of collective shock. 

But at the breakfast buffet one table, Damien Hardman, Reggae Ellis and Sean Doherty seemed to be faring better than others, so I sat down with them. They weren’t LOL-ing, obviously, but they definitely weren’t doing performative grief either. The salt on their scrambled eggs wasn’t tear-sourced. I think it was Reg who explained, “When you get to our age mate, you kinda get used to people dying. Usually, they get sick for a while first — and then they die.” 

I must be about the same age Reg was then, now. He wasn’t far off the mark.

I did the paddle out for Andy at the contest site a couple of days later. Back on the beach, my friend and colleague Timo was standing holding his housing, looking at me with a scowl. “Oh what? Did you do some fucking journalism out there?” he asked, particularly pithy, withering. I didn’t bite, nor enquire as to the particular source of his disapproval. I didn’t need to. He was dealing with some pretty gnarly stuff of his own at the time. But whatever state of mind he was in though, one thing you could always rely on him for was some straight talk. 

Timo was also a man of extreme contradictions. When I first met him 22 years ago he drove a two-door Renault Twingo, on which the previous owners had painted a cartoon world map and covered it in surf stickers. Being a pretty tall and often pretty fierce-looking human, and the Twingo being the smallest car you could buy, my friend Joel reckoned it was “the least Timo-ish car in the whole world.”  For how staunch Timo was, I always thought he was at his best when being off-brand. Exactly what sort of a person he was depends on whom you ask; he could be charming, warm, funny, affable, and equal parts caustic, hostile, nihilistic. 

Timo came from Finland, about as far as you can get from world-class waves. He left school and went to work in a repro house, borrowed his dad’s a Nikon F camera, photographed some snowboarder friends, and got a double spread in a snow mag with the very first roll of film he ever shot. A migration south to Spain and then France saw him eventually earn his spot amongst some of the most elite water photographers in surfing. Swimming at places like Pipeline, Teahupo’o, Puerto, La Gravière, he was in pretty rare company. Not bad for a gangly skater kid from Kontula, Helsinki.  

Before GoPro, fish-eye still photography in print magazines was the closest most of us ever came to the innards of big tubes. The photos themselves were the prize, but unlike most forms of photography, watching them being taken could reveal a whole set of physical and mental skills generally unnoticed by non-devotees. The photogs’ touch on the water whilst swimming, how they lined up the surfer’s rail and the lip line, how they could hang in then swim through the wave without making any splash or chandeliers set them apart.

On the North Shore, Timo watched and learned from people like Scott Aichner. Timo may have shot the first proper fish-eye tube shot at Mundaka. He may also have shot surfing’s first successful bomb drop, Mike Morrissey in San Sebastián in 2002. A staffer at Quiksilver and Surf Europe — where I worked, through the 2000’s surf boom years — he was constantly travelling and shooting the best surfers in the world.      

Being a specialist rather than a generalist is great for covers, less so features. He’d go on a trip with some of the best surfers in the world and come back with almost nothing but wide-angle water shots. We’d have ten, twelve pages earmarked for the feature. Deadline last week. Bro, you couldn’t shoot a lineup or two? Beers at sunset vibes?

Timo was in Tahiti with Quiksilver when the Code Red swell came together. He was in a prime spot in the boat in the channel for Nathan Fletcher’s wave. When he got back and came into the office, our Photo Editor Alex Laurel asked him where the shots were. “Oh I didn’t shoot it,” Timo said, stone-faced. “I just wanted to watch. I might’ve got a couple with my phone…” Alex’s hair was already thinning. That may have been the final straw.

For all his focus on big tubes, one of his favourite ever trips was to the Severn Bore river wave in SW England with Jon Rose and a local river legend known as Steve “the Wizard” King. Timo loved it. He called me from a pub in the Gloucestershire countryside, cows mooing, maybe the happiest I’ve ever seen him. I’ll never forget him saying, with his accent: “Oh yah, we scored this morning. Right now I’m just here in the beer garden at the Red Lion having a ploughman’s with Rosey and The Wizard.”

Timo shot Nikon. “Black lens,” he liked to say. (Canon lenses are white). Most people shot Canon. He called them “Canonators.” As in, “I got there early, and then all the fucking Canonators showed up, of course.” When every surf photo in the world started doing the desaturated, pushed contrast Insta filter look, he hated it. Almost as much as he despised the mid-face trim, moment-between-the-moments becoming action shots.

Timo had an amazing work ethic — he could swim eight-foot Hossegor for six hours without even drinking a sip of water in a sort of masochistic purge. He could also be spectacularly lazy. He could get into an argument in a room by himself. He loved a comments section beef. But if it’s any consolation to those on the receiving end, he probably reserved most of his ire for himself.

At the same time, there were countless random amateur shooters who he’d taken time to help out. He could spend hours talking about f-stops or sawing petals off to complete strangers when he was in the mood. I’d meet crew and they’d say “Timo, he’s such a lovely guy.” And I’d be like, “That Timo? The one with the prison grin?” He always got on with the talent too. Maybe because he didn’t have a shred of artifice about him. He did tell me once that maybe the reason he got on pretty well with Slater and Dane in the peak Quik days is because he knew when to “shut the fuck up and put the camera down. I wasn’t trying to turn every moment into content.”   

When my first son was born Timo came over, brought his flash box set up, and shot portraits of the three of us in the garden. He colour corrected them, saved them in different sizes and crops, put them on a USB stick, and brought that over. He put more effort into that family portrait than some assignments that cost thousands. That he did it only a year or so after his own young daughter Meri had died — I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for him to do.  

When things unraveled for Timo he did try to work on himself. He went and did an ayahuasca purge in Amsterdam after talking with Slater about his experience with it. He’d lost a child, had a mental breakdown, got divorced, and watched his surf photography career go down the drain within a relatively few years. Surf Europe went tits up, the Quik gravy train derailed not too long after. Timo refused to get into shooting video. There was a path there. He had the contacts and expertise to shift to moving images, but it just wasn’t him. A significant portion of the SW-France-based-former-still-photographer cohort now all work on The 100ft Wave for HBO, but he always stuck with his passion for stills. His work seems to have touched an awful lot of people. I probably never really appreciated just how talented he was because I never really saw him through his photos. I was mainly focused on diplomacy and trying to hit deadlines without any of us getting fired. 

Covid lockdown was pretty severe in France. I’d hidden a board in the forest and had been sneaking in sessions in a shorebreak peak when I could. On the day of the April full moon in 2020, I called him for a sesh that night at my secret bank. We were a little late, by midnight the moon was pretty high and not really lighting up the waves. The real issue was it was kinda solid, 6ft plus and too big for the sandbar, and for the dark. He’d more or less given up surfing at that point. He wasn’t doing great. He was sticking around to be near his son Kai, but there was nothing much else for him here in France. When we went our separate ways on the bike path, I had no idea that would be the last time we’d ever surf together. Or rather, not surf together. 

Timo moved back to Finland, fell in love, remarried, and landed a pretty epic gig shooting freeskier Candid Thovex around the world for Audi. The last conversation we had was a few weeks ago, he said he still had a brand new custom Brewer gun glassed by Jack Reeves on the North Shore, currently at Jamie Mitchell’s house. He said he wasn’t sure how or even if he was ever going to get that board over to Europe. We were talking about a prize surfboard, but we both knew we were really talking about something else. Timo held on until just after his 60th birthday last week, doing better than the prognosis when he was first diagnosed with thyroid cancer late last year. 

In November last year I was in Taiwan for an event. Timo had DM’d me because I’d been in one of Vaughan Deadly’s stories, and he knew Vaughan from a trip to France years ago, when they were shooting a Waves movie with Ozzie and The Goons. He asked how Vaughan was, and when I replied he told me about the diagnosis. 

The next morning we were driving up the east coast to the comp site.

“Fark! There’s a blast from the past…Timo! How is he?” asked Vaughan.

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“Well not great, actually. He said the docs said he had about ten weeks to live — and that that was nine and a half weeks ago.” 

For some reason, we all just burst out laughing. The whole car cracking up. A mate, an old acquaintance and a couple of total strangers who’d never met or heard of him, all laughing not at his pending demise, but just the whole twisted comedy of life. 

I’m pretty sure all the versions of Timo that I knew would’ve got a dark kick out of that.