Since last October, when photographer and surf explorer, John Seaton Callahan, published his mammoth account of searching for waves in some of the most remote places in the world over the past 25 years, there have been almost as many different opinions voiced about the man as there are surf gems that he has documented (28 in the coffee table book published in Australia, 47 in the original draft).

When you consider what it takes to put together the logistics for strike missions into places like the no-man’s-land of the Nouadhibou Peninsula, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic, or recently-war torn Liberia, you might easily wonder how this obsession may have changed Callahan over a quarter century. Surf writer Sam George eloquently summed up his personal observations of Callahan at work in ‘The Inertia’ last October:

“In a remote quadrant of the Indian Ocean, on the deck of a chartered motor-yacht, hove-to off the shore of Little Andaman Island, I got a clear picture of how committed photographer, John Seaton Callahan, was to his singular brand of global surf exploration. Following a protracted voyage from Thailand, during which engine trouble twice forced a return to port, the assembled crew of pro-surfers recruited by Callahan … were restive, to say the least. So that when at the very first spot marked on Callahan’s British Admiralty charts they found a perfect, peeling six-foot, left reef break, it seemed that the corrosive mix of hardships and boredom were washed away by the magic of a pristine surf discovery.

John Callahan has made a career out of capturing images that suggest the dream is out there if you are willing to go look for it.

“Or so it seemed, until after only a few hours of surfing … Callahan called the surfers back to ...