Legends of the Sandbar: a Life of Surf on the Outer Banks

Photographer and writer Christopher Bickford spent nearly a decade capturing the nature and culture of his adopted home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, filtered through the experience of its die-hard local surfing community. In the resulting book, Legends of the Sandbar, he harnesses a fusion of dramatic imagery and evocative text to tell the story of a waterlogged tribe of misfits making their stand on a shifting string of earth at the edge of the continental shelf. A mix of poetry and science, memoir and history, moody landscapes and explosive action photography, Legends of the Sandbar pays tribute to a place, a people, and a passion, and provides a window into a unique culture on the fringes of American civilization. "Sandbar" grew out of one of Bickford's earlier projects, "After the Storm", which The New York Times called "a little book with fantastical images that make you feel as if you are that make you feel as if you’re engulfed in the wild tumult of a raging ocean, " and which Outside Magazine hailed as "one of the most striking surf projects we've seen in a long while." The 264 flexi-bound first edition of Legends of the Sandbar is printed in duotone on the highest quality paper, by Editoriale Bortolazzi-Stei of Verona, Italy, and is published through Burn Books, a collection of photographic works curated by Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey. Christopher Bickford is a freelance photographer and writer whose work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and numerous other publications worldwide. He currently resides in North Carolina. More information on the project is available at www.legendsofthesandbar.com, and Bickford's other works can be viewed on his website, www.chrisbickford.com.