Souls of the Canyon

Soul Stack Studio started with a love of photography, a love of the ocean, and a decision to build a life around the things that make us happy. We are Cassandra and Clive. When we first came to Nazare, we knew the ocean would become a big part of our lives. What we didn't realise was how much the people who spend their lives out there would become part of our story too. Souls of the Canyon is the story of our first year photographing the big-wave surfers of Nazare. For many months, we stood on those cliffs with our cameras, often in the cold, sometimes waiting for hours for nothing much to happen. And then, almost without warning, everything would change. The ocean would come alive, the waves would build, and the surfers would head out. When we first started photographing Nazare, it was the size and power of the waves that caught our attention. It is hard not to be drawn in by them. But the more time we spent there, the more we found ourselves looking beyond the waves. Slowly, we began to understand that big-wave surfing is about so much more than riding a huge wave. There is an incredible amount of patience, courage and trust involved. You have to know the ocean, respect it, and accept that there will always be things you cannot control. Our cameras gave us a reason to keep coming back, but they also taught us how much there was still to learn. One of the first things we had to learn was simply how to recognise who we were photographing. From the cliffs, everything happens incredibly quickly. There can be so much water, spray and movement that, at first, it was almost impossible to tell one surfer from another. So we started learning the little things. The colour of a board. A wetsuit. A sponsor's logo. Someone's stance. And that was when the photographs started to feel different to us. The more we watched, the more connected we felt to the people we had originally come to simply photograph. Souls of the Canyon isn't meant to be a perfect record of big-wave surfing, and we certainly don't claim to be the perfect technical surf photographers. We are still learning. We are learning the ocean, learning the light, most of all, learning how to capture something that happens incredibly quickly and from quite a distance. These photographs are our perspective, two people standing on the cliffs of Nazare with cameras, trying to capture what we felt, what we saw, and what made us keep coming back. But every image means something to us. Each one is connected to a moment we were there to witness or a feeling we wanted to hold on to. Over this year, the ocean taught us a lot about patience. It taught us that you cannot force the moment you are waiting for. It is our first year photographing the surfers of Nazare and our first real glimpse into a world that, from the outside, can seem almost impossible to understand. Thank you for being here, and for taking the time to look at our photographs. We hope that, somewhere amongst these images, you can feel a little of what we felt standing on those cliffs - the excitement, the nerves, the beauty, the uncertainty, and above all, the incredible human spirit behind the waves. With love from Nazare, Cassandra & Clive Soul Stack Studio