THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Greater Power : His talent may be matched only by his ego. But Aaron Chang still bows to the ocean that made him a star among photographers.

SAN DIEGO — Aaron Chang arranges a backdrop at the far end of his studio and moves back to his camera. The oversized room, a warehouse in the ‘30s, is stripped down to brick walls, hardwood floors and a high, curved wood ceiling. Chamber music plays on a stereo. The atmosphere is practical, understated and elegant, just as Chang would have it.

Today’s project is to shoot portraits of local poets for a city lifestyle magazine. The first of six, a superannuated hippie in bare feet, jeans and a baggy vest, sits in three-quarter profile. Chang reaches out to adjust his subject’s arm, composing his shot the easy way. The hard way is to do it while floating on an air mattress deep in the maw of a 12-foot wave at Sunset Beach, Hawaii, in hopes of nailing pro surfer Bruce Raymond as he floors it through the tube.

Being the world’s top surf photographer, as Chang was throughout the ‘80s, requires a calculating mind. But on that day in 1983 his calculation failed completely: A Zeppelin-size ball of white water snuffed surfer and photographer, bouncing them off the rock bottom. Raymond was hospitalized with torn tendons in his knee. Chang floated in the channel for two hours as a huge bruise spread across his hip, unsure if he could kick his way to shore but wondering all the time if he had gotten the shot.

Working in far safer conditions, Chang smoothly clicks off three more exposures of the barefoot poet, then says, “That’s it.” Later that day, he considers his career, pointing out the obvious in a soft, factual voice: “I’m productive. I’m reliable. I’m bankable.” Then, reflecting on poets and surfers, bikini models and Nobel scientists, elephants in the Namibian bush and his hundreds of other subjects: “And I’m pretty versatile too.”

*

Chang shifted his attention to mainstream commercial and editorial work five years ago, with good, if not earth-shaking, results. He shot a Nike swimwear catalogue. His image of a love-struck couple at Hussong’s Cantina became the best-selling poster of 1989 and did well for three years. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, GQ, People, US and Elle.

But he has stayed active in surfing, partly for love and money and partly because, after grinding away as a cog in the huge corporate advertising/editorial machine, he can still, at his convenience, walk the beaches of the surf world as a genuine star.

Which is as it should be. More than anyone else in the past 15 years, Chang has shaped the artistic and business boundaries of surf photography. “When American Photographer (magazine) put Chang on the cover,” says Jeff Divine, photo editor of Surfer magazine, recalling the July, 1985, issue that also featured a 16-page Chang portfolio, “it was a big thing for all of us. Massively big.

“Finally, the world had a real look at what we do. Here it is, surf photography: It’s beautiful, it’s difficult, it takes years of training. Maybe somebody else could have stepped in and had their work shown off in a similar way. But Aaron was the one. He deserved it.”

Divine then offers an explanation for Chang’s success: “You know, it’s not so much that Aaron is versatile. . . . It’s that he’s driven. I don’t know where it comes from, but he’s really driven--to where it’s almost scary.”

At least part of that drive comes from the relentless teasing Chang says he got about the shape of his eyes at school in Imperial Beach, in the southwestern corner of San Diego County.

“It was a big part of my growing up. Really destabilizing,” he says.

At first, Chang dismisses the idea that the childhood taunts helped fuel his career, then changes his mind. “It made me angry, definitely, and it made me want to be better than these kinds of people. So, yeah, actually, I think it has been an important factor in my success so far.”

The ocean, Chang says, was his saving grace. He got his first surfboard at age 11 and soon became a regular at the Imperial Beach break, “where there was no racism, just ability.” One of the hottest local surfers, Chang recalls, was Filipino. Another was Mexican American.

Although he competed as a swimmer through high school and did schoolyard athletics, surfing moved him in a different way. It still does.

“There are moments when I enter the water,” Chang says, articulating what he’d once found impossible to explain, “that I really do feel the presence of God. And those moments are very important to my psychological stability. Particularly in Hawaii, where you’re surrounded by these tremendous currents of energy, to a point where there just is no denying this force greater than your own. You have to resign yourself to this greater power. Or at least I have to, or I can’t do what I have to do.”

On a temporal level, he loves the physical challenge of surfing, the way it lends itself to travel, and the idea that dedicated surfers can refine their technique well into middle age.

Two years before Chang took up surfing, his father had given him a Kodak camera for Christmas. He got a Super 8 movie camera a few years later and began shooting anything that moved--including his friends riding waves.

His entry into professional photography, as Chang explains it, was little more than a means by which he could continue to surf full-time. After high school and two semesters of junior college photo classes, he moved to the North Shore of Oahu, center of the surfing universe, and for three years scraped by with an occasional photo sale to Surfing magazine. “Basically,” Chang says, “my life in Hawaii was surfing and starving.”

By 1977 Chang had found an informal mentor in Dan Merkel, then Surfing magazine’s top gun. One afternoon, as they floated side by side on an air mattress at Sunset Beach, Chang asked Merkel how much money he made. The answer, $600 a month plus expenses for a near-constant series of surf adventures, stunned Chang. “This was absolutely amazing to me,” he says. “The idea that a person could travel the world, surf the best places, get cover shots, and put away that kind of money. Yeah, I just went for it. Completely. And did it for 10 straight years, totally stoked.”

Chang hit the high spots in Australia, South Africa and Bali, as well as Madagascar, Namibia and Peru. In winter he would be back at the North Shore, where the best surfers return, as they have for the past 40 years, to ride the strongest and best-shaped big waves in the world.

Chang’s rise as a photographer corresponded with a steady upswing in the surf industry. The money got better and better. In 1989, at age 33, he had a $40,000 annual retainer from Surfing magazine and was billing $20,000 for free-lance jobs.

The non-surfing world had also taken note of his work. In 1983, Chang’s photos appeared in a coffee-table book titled “A Day in the Life of Hawaii,” and he contributed to the ensuing series on Spain, Canada, Japan, America and the Soviet Union.

He had hit his full artistic stride when the American Photographer feature came out. His portraiture was well composed and technically perfect, his land-based images found new angles on done-to-death places, and his water photography, built on his still-formidable swimming ability and knowledge of waves, was deep and tight.

Chang helped perfect a technique in which the photographer, holding a 10-pound camera and housing in both hands and adjusting his water position via kick-strokes, allows himself to be pulled vertically up the face of a wave just as it curls. As the surfer rides by, the photographer, now positioned near the ceiling of the wave, swings his camera toward the rider, hits the shutter, then ducks out through the back. The resulting image puts the viewer at ground zero. The surfer should seem close enough to touch, the crashing wave close enough to feel.

Other surf photographers were doing excellent work too. Don King swam as well as Chang, if not better, and often got even deeper into the tube. Portrait shots by Art Brewer and Jeff Hornbaker had more of an edge. Surfer magazine’s Divine and Craig Fineman did impeccable work from the land. Still, nobody was quite as impressive as Chang.

“The thing that separates Aaron from the rest of the pack,” says Larry Moore, Surfing magazine’s photo editor since 1977, “is that he always makes the right decisions: what lens to use, where to set up, what exposure, what film. Some guys, even some of the good guys, never completely master all the variables. Aaron does that stuff as easy as breathing.”

Pro surfer and big-wave specialist Brock Little, who has known Chang for 10 years, calls him the ultimate surf photographer. “His intensity carries,” Little says. “It’s motivating. Other guys are laid-back, cruising. I do what I want, and they get the shot or they don’t. Aaron likes to take charge.”

If Chang also has earned a part in the surf photographers’ “personality freak show,” as another pro surfer puts it, it is a minor one. Although the sport has been tremendously well-served by its visual historians since the mid ‘30s, when Hermosa Beach dentist John H. (Doc) Ball built a wooden water housing for his Graflex and paddled out at Palos Verdes Cove to shoot his friends steering their 11-foot, 100-pound redwood planks toward shore, the ranks have been filled with societal fringe-dwellers.

One of Surfer magazine’s top photographers of the ‘60s never fully recovered from a long series of acid trips and disappeared into the Hawaiian tropics, never to be heard from again. In 1987, Angus Chater, a young Englishman whose work had just been featured in an eight-page Surfer magazine spread, ran a tube from his car’s exhaust pipe to its driver’s side window, turned the key and asphyxiated himself.

“Then you have the garden-variety manic-depressives and alcoholics,” says Rob Gilley, photo editor for the quarterly Surfer’s Journal, “and the drug addicts, the suspected pedophiles, the guys who call at 3 in the morning to check if their latest stuff has arrived, on and on. It’s not quite as strange today as it used to be. But going down the line of surf photographers, man to man, it’s incredible how many head cases you find.”

Low pay, artistic sensitivity, too much travel, too much competition--nobody knows exactly why so many of them wander off.

Chang is unlikely to be remembered as a head case, but rather as one who takes a lordly view of his position in the surf world. “Chang,” says pro surfer Little, “is one arrogant bastard.”

In 1987, Chang told Surfing magazine that the growing number of photographers on North Shore beaches had turned the area into a “maggot scene.” As Gilley recalls, “Some of the best guys in the business today were just getting started when Aaron said that, and (they) still haven’t forgotten. It left a lingering bad taste in a lot of mouths.”

*

Chang thinks a moment about his reputation as he strips off his wet suit after a mid-morning surf at Black’s Beach in La Jolla. He and his wife of two years had arrived an hour earlier, driving a short distance from their home in the just-completed Chateau Village tract in Del Mar. (“About as First World as it gets,” he says with quiet disdain. “One of the compromises of married life.”)

Erika, 24, is still out bodyboarding. Later, she will go to work two doors down from her husband’s studio, marketing Aaron Chang Photoactive Wear, a line of T-shirts and sweat shirts featuring black-and-white reproductions of the photographer’s work.

Chang looks out at the small autumn waves. He understands the charges of arrogance but writes them off as a misinterpretation of what he calls a disciplined work ethic. It’s a convincing argument until Chang undermines it: “Quite often, I’d be making decisions and not following anybody. I work on this different level. Those guys, the other surf photographers, would be hanging around, chummy with each other. And I was really serious. A lot of people don’t understand the process of being the best.”

If he can be highhanded on occasion, quiet confidence is the rule. His thoughts emerge well-structured and balanced. In a recent interview on KPBS, San Diego’s National Public Radio affiliate, Chang spoke without a trace of SoCal beach inflection and remained composed when his questioner brought up the sexism issue: the photographer’s seven-year contribution to Surfing’s annual swimsuit issue, or, as a mid ‘80s cover blurb put it, “Bikinis! Bikinis! Bikinis!”

“I’ve thought a lot about the sexism argument,” he says later, “and this is what I’ve come up with. I think I have a healthy love of women. I think I’m a product of my environment. And I think my sexuality, in some ways, is as contradictory as it is for society at large.” After a three-year hiatus, Chang will do Surfing’s 1995 swimsuit issue. “But the magazine can’t use the work bikini ,” he says with a touch of rationalization. “And I want to show the girls in the water surfing, not just posing.”

*

Chang gave up full-time surf photography in 1990, just before the surf market crash that cut San Clemente-based Surfing’s size in half, to about 100 pages monthly.

A long-running feud with Jeff Hornbaker, who lived with Chang in Hawaii in the early ‘80s and collaborated with him on photo projects, had something to do with the decision, Chang says. So did the drain of hanging around with the perpetually stoked, although Chang makes allowances for hyper-focused young surfers.

“I relate to what they do, I understand it, I dig the enthusiasm. It’s the guys in their mid or late 20s, or older, who still haven’t learned how to look outside of surfing--those guys bring me down. Surfing is strange that way. On one hand it’s this great force, this physical and spiritual thing, but it can also be a real block to growth. People get sucked into it and don’t come back for a long, long time.”

Chang set up shop in San Diego in 1992 with two other studio photographers, already well into his transformation from surfing specialist to mainstream utility man. His “Kiss” poster series, variations on the best-selling Hussong’s poster of 1989, was an early success. He did the American Cancer Society annual report in 1992, and photographed Joni Mitchell for US magazine. Chang’s earnings this year, he says, will be more than $100,000.

“Aaron’s doing well with the mainstream stuff,” says Divine of Surfer magazine, “but . . . he’s just got his foot in the door.”

Chang’s self-assessment: “I’m a rookie. I’m a rookie who shows a lot of promise. These,” he says, gesturing to the framed “Kiss” posters on his office wall, “are like rookie home runs.”

Although he no longer tours the world’s best breaks, Chang stays close to the beach and surfs almost as often as he did as a teen-ager. In May, 1993, in two-foot waves at Imperial Beach, he flicked his board up and away at the end of a crummy ride and landed upside down in his own wake in shallow water. The top of his head hit the sand, producing fissures along his seventh vertebra.

Chang’s right shoulder and arm were paralyzed. The first doctor recommended immediate surgery. A second said wait a few weeks and see. Chang agreed, leaving the hospital the next day with a neck brace and wheelchair. The paralysis lasted for three weeks, a period so confusing and full of fear that, after two or three minutes’ worth of false starts, he gives up trying to talk about it.

In March, after 10 months’ rehabilitation, Chang went back to Imperial Beach with his water housing and camera, swam out in the pre-dawn light and took a series of high-action--and highly therapeutic--surf shots.

“Physically, I’m completely healed,” he says. “But I have a sense of mortality that wasn’t there before. I’m not afraid of dying. But I’m afraid of pain, and afraid of these imagined moments of impact. I have moments of fear, particularly in traffic, that just grip me completely.”

An assistant enters the office and hands Chang a coffee-table book, “Golf: the Greatest Game,” and he is happy to change the subject. “Wow, look how far I’ve come,” Chang says deadpan, slightly amused that a still-hard-core surfer did the cover of a golf book, a shot of a player watching his ball disappear into a rainbow.

He’s much more interested in talking about the North Shore big-surf season, which begins next month. It’s a comeback year, although Chang doesn’t use the phrase. The crowd of photographers, again, will be his biggest obstacle. The only way around it, he says, will be to go out when the waves are so big, thick and gnarly that the rest of the pack retreats.

He pulls out some old surf magazines, thinking out loud about his approach this year, that if conditions allow he could engineer something new. “I don’t need to be wildly productive. I’ve done that. The challenge for me in surf photography is to be creative again.”

Asked which of his shots he’s most proud, Chang is silent, turning pages. Without looking up, he answers. “It’s too early to ask that question. The strongest phase of my career is ahead of me.” The residual fear of neck injury is out of his mind now, and Chang’s quiet voice is confident, bordering on arrogant.

Aaron Chang

Age: 38.

Native?: No; born in Arizona, raised in Imperial Beach, now lives in Del Mar.

Family: Married for two years to Erika Chang.

Passions: Surfing, reading, traveling.

On his father: “He served in World War II, got in on the GI Bill, and went to school in Ohio because he wanted to see Middle America. He’s a very adventurous person. I think I got a lot of my wanderlust from him. He went to the University of Mexico for a year, in the late ‘40s, to study bullfighting. I’ve seen a picture of him in a suit of lights, before he fought his first bull.”

On the challenge of water photography: “Because of the interaction with surfers and with the ocean, and because it’s so physical, it can be very exciting. Most photography is passive. Water photography is almost a sport in itself.”

On productivity versus creativity: “Productivity really does quash the creative drive sometimes. Creativity is stronger at the outset of your career, when you don’t really know any better. You’re so enthusiastic that you’ll devote two or three hours to a single shot.”