Community Corner

VIDEO: Check out the 'Smithsonian of Surfing'

The Surfing Heritage and Culture Center preserves relics from the beginning of the sport.

By Jessica Burger

You might call it the “Smithsonian of surfing.”

In fact, that’s what its curator calls it.

It is the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center, tucked inside of an industrial complex at 110 Calle Iglesia in San Clemente. The nonprofit is dedicated to the preservation and documentation of surf culture from its beginning to the present.

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Curator and Creative Director Barry Haun gave the center the lofty nickname based on the especially large collection of boards and surf photography. The center has artifacts representing every style of surfboard since the early 1900s, and photos dating back to the 1940s.

The center's museum has been made possible mostly through donated items and includes more than 100 donated surfboards by Phillip "Flippy" Hoffman, four boards attributed to Hawaian surf legend Duke Khanamoku and others from modern legends, such as San Clemente's Greg Long.

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The surf photography archive is one of the larger collections in existence and seeks to digitalize and forever document the early surf years which were caught on film, Haun said. 

The archival project is managed by Steve Wilkings, a former surf photographer who worked for Surfer magazine for 20-plus years. He believes he was first to put a camera—protected by a homemade plastic housing unit—on the back of a surfboard to capture the iconic shot of a surfer inside the tube.



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