When surfing photographer Nathaniel Harrington dropped by an island home to cheer up a young fan of his photos, he wasn’t prepared to get a boost himself.
Camden Rice, 15, a water sports fanatic, was recovering from a six-hour surgery for progressive scoliosis. Housebound and in pain, he had been following Harrington’s surfing photos on Instagram and was stunned to see he lived in Vero.
A mutual friend connected the two, thinking Harrington might also want to meet Camden’s mom, Marilu Rice, a former gallery owner in Chicago, Boston and New York.
As a result of that visit to a stir-crazy kid, Harrington, 29, is now showing a selection of his photographs in a show here organized by Rice.
Mostly self-taught, Harrington, 29, has been shooting action sports since the age of 15 when he borrowed his dad’s camera and started taking pictures of snowboarders around his hometown of Sunrise, Minnesota.
By 18, he was selling his photos to snowboarding shops and, eventually, to magazines and catalogues. Then, on a trip to Laguna Beach, California, a friend taught him how to surf.
“I never looked back,” he says. “I fell in love with the ocean.”
In California, he met his wife Tatum; everyone calls them Nate and Tate now. Tatum, a model, is on a recent cover of Portfolio magazine riding a dirt bike. Her husband shot the photo.
The couple were in Hawaii when they learned Tatum was pregnant. Daughter River, now 2, is the reason they moved to Vero, where they are closer to Tatum’s parents in St. Pete.
It was in Vero that Harrington’s photography took a turn toward fine art. Used to shooting surfers in California and Hawaii, he became fascinated with shooting the lapping waves along the quiet shoreline here. With his Canon 7D in burst mode, he would lie or swim in the shallows along the water’s edge and in less than a second, capture up to half a dozen frames as the tiny barrel of the wave broke over him.
Back home on his computer, he pored through the downloaded images often with more excitement than when he shot the waves themselves. “It’s the most exciting part, because you remember every wave,” he says. “There’s a million things that can go wrong with water photography. It’s like, yes! You did it. Or you didn’t.”
Despite their startling color and clarity, Harrington’s photos are not manipulated. Keeping the aperture wide open and a shallow depth of field, he has learned how to best capture the effects of light reflected off the water, the changes as daybreak brightens and the hues coming off the sky.
“Vero is a brilliant place to shoot surf. It has the most unique waves I’ve ever shot, the way they break, the form that the waves get, is unique to this area,” he says.
“It’s everything from the outer reefs to the sand bars to the trough and steepness of this beach. And it has everything to do with Vero’s wind. When it’s blowing hard up north, we’ll have zero wind in Vero. It’s not so good for surfing, but it’s good to shoot surf.”
By the time Harrington met Marilu Rice, “he had over a thousand images,” she says. Picking a few choice shots, she urged Harrington to do signed, limited-edition prints on aluminum to make the work look more like liquid.
She told Harrington, “This is a breathtaking series of abstract art.”
“I never thought about it that way myself, but I really liked the way it looked,” says Harrington.
Meanwhile, while taking care of her son – and his ever-rambunctious twin brother Ethan – Rice herself had been creating. Not art, though. Salsa. Using a lime-intensive recipe of her husband David, she was determined to sell her product at local farmer’s markets. To do that, she needed a commercial kitchen, and scouting the market at Windsor one day, she approached a private chef and caterer, Jesse Alexander, who has spent a decade cooking for Guy and Dede Snowden.
Alexander, a graduate of the University of Florida in business, learned cooking at the Royal Palm Pointe restaurant Ellie’s, working as sous-chef for two years before it closed in 2004. The following summer, he started as personal chef to the Snowdens. He opened his catering business, Orchid Gourmet, in 2010, and the next year began providing the food for Hawk’s Nest Golf Club.
A year ago, Alexander invested in a run-down property on 14th Avenue in the downtown arts district. By December, he had transformed it into Orchid Gourmet’s new home.
The tidy dark gray building set back from the road contains a commercial kitchen in the back and a large, loft-like space in the front. Available for events, there is a sound system, a bar and a farm table that seats 18.
When Rice heard about the space, she thought about her salsa making. When she visited and saw the blank wall space, she thought about art.
It had been years since she organized an art show. But before she married and had the twins, Marilu Lannon had opened cutting-edge galleries in Boston, New York and Chicago, a pioneer of art districts in unlikely neighborhoods.
While she didn’t want to start her own gallery again, Alexander’s space seemed the perfect compromise: During season, when Orchid Gourmet’s rental space would be the busiest, she could rotate the works of artists of her choosing on a quarterly basis. Happy to have fresh art on his walls, Alexander agreed.
“I think of it as a sort of pop-up,” she says. The art would be seen in the private events of Alexander’s clients, and open to the public during gallery strolls.
In March, Harrington became her first artist.
Last Friday, Rice got the last of her licenses to sell her salsa at the Ocean Drive farmer’s market. “It took six months,” she says with exasperation.
That night at the gallery stroll, in Orchid Gourmet’s kitchen, she was mixing not salsa but rum punch. It was the third of Harrington’s receptions. Fifty people dropped by, she says.
As Harrington mingled with the crowd, Rice kept up a steady patter promoting his work to their guests.
“He’s literally like a mermaid,” she told one visitor. “He’s constantly in the water getting pounded by these waves.”
And so is Camden, she is happy to report. He has fully recovered and is surfing again, just as Nate had predicted.
“You’re going to be back in the water in no time,” Harrington had told Camden as he left the house that day. “I’ll see you in the waves.”
