The series begins on land. Boards are unloaded from a car, wetsuits are pulled on, and a jet ski waits at the water’s edge. Only later does the ocean take over the frame.

That order matters because Nazaré is often reduced to one fact: the waves are enormous. It is a small fishing village and seaside resort on the Portuguese coast, but in winter North Atlantic storms send large swells towards a 16,000-foot submarine canyon just offshore. As the seafloor rises towards land, that energy is pushed upwards into cold walls of water reported at between 60 and 100 feet.

Size is easy to describe and strangely difficult to show. In a photograph, an enormous wave without a familiar point of reference can become little more than shape and texture. The water fills the frame, but the scale disappears.

Between October 2015 and January 2016, André Silva and I worked on this series to make that scale easier to comprehend. André made the photographs and I wrote the copy, with the project originally planned for publication in Wonders.

The first part of the series stays close to the people involved. We see boards being prepared, wetsuits adjusted, safety equipment checked, and surfers waiting. The portraits are quiet compared with the images that follow, but they make the later photographs more legible: these are the people who will soon become small marks against the water.

Once the action moves offshore, the relationship changes. Jet skis and surfers provide the reference points that the waves cannot provide by themselves, while the cliffs and shoreline show how close all that energy is to land. The task was never simply to make the scene look spectacular; it was to preserve enough context for the viewer to understand what they were looking at.

The surfers riding at Nazaré included Garrett McNamara, Andrew Cotton, Kohl Christensen, Hugo Vau, Aaron Gold, Sebastian Steudtner, and Kealii Mamala, among others. Their work sits where a particular coastline, winter weather, preparation, and human judgement meet. The images later appeared in Outside Magazine and The Inertia as well as being created for Wonders.

The series ends much as it began, with people on land and the ocean in front of them. They are almost lost against it, which is precisely what finally makes the scale visible.