On the rocks above Punta Roca, in the coastal town of La Libertad, there is a man who has been quietly doing the same thing for over thirty years: watching the waves, waiting for the right moment, and pressing the shutter. Mario Amaya- known across social media as Quekasurfer is widely credited as the man who put El Salvador’s surf history on film, one roll at a time, long before anyone else.
A teenager in the mid-1980s, Amaya grew up near the coast, close enough to Punta Roca that he could watch foreign surfers ride one of the best right-hand point breaks in the world. He had no camera and no money to buy one. What changed his path was a small act of generosity when an American Catholic priest working in the area lent him a film camera so he could capture what he was seeing. Amaya had no training and no darkroom access- rolls of film were scarce in El Salvador at the time, and getting them developed meant sending them to a lab in San Salvador and waiting, sometimes for months, just to find out whether anything had come out at all. His first roll came back almost entirely black. He kept shooting.
What makes Amaya’s archive remarkable isn’t just age, it’s what was happening around him while he built it. He was out on those rocks with a borrowed camera during El Salvador’s murderous civil war. This was a time when the entire country was living through profound danger and uncertainty. He kept shooting. In the years that followed, as the war gave way to a different kind of violence as the rise of the gangs reshaped daily life in Salvadoran communities. Through all of it, the surf never ceased, and Amaya kept shooting. His black-and-white images from that era are now considered a visual record that exists nowhere else.
Amaya went on to work as a staff photographer for Salvadoran newspapers, starting in the sports pages in the early 1990s, where he pushed, by his own account, hard-to-get surfing coverage into a national media landscape entirely devoted to soccer. Over the decades he documented the country’s own surfers growing up, stills in real time, following athletes like Jimmy Rotherham, Bryan Pérez, and Amado de Jesús Alvarado from their earliest days in the water, then through their professional careers. His photographs continue to appear in Salvadoran outlets covering the sport today. When the Surf City initiative in El Salvador launched and began drawing international competitions to these same beaches, Amaya found himself photographing surfers he had grown up admiring from afar: Kelly Slater and Tom Curren to name a few.
Through every stage of that arc, technology changed along with his country, analog to digital, war to a fragile peace then to Surf City. An unknown local shooting from the rocks to a name credited in national newspapers, Amaya has remained notably unassuming about it. He speaks about his career less as an achievement than as a stroke of good fortune: a stranger who lent him a camera, editors who eventually gave surfing a chance, a country that finally noticed the waves it had all along. He still shoots the way he always has: by his own hand rather than a screen, for him the point was never the technology. It was always just being there, on the rocks, watching the wave that was about to break. And he keeps shooting.
How did you first get into surf photography?
I started going to Punta Roca around age 18, in the mid-1980s. I didn’t have a camera. I’d just go to watch. Foreigners would come to surf and the level of skill really caught my attention. I wanted to capture it, to have those memories printed, not just in my mind. But at first that wasn’t possible. I didn’t know the first thing about using a camera. Around the same time I met an American priest from a diocese in Cleveland who lent me a film camera. It didn’t have much reach, but I had fun with it. Developing the rolls was the hard part. There was no lab locally, so we sent them to the capital, which cost real money. I’d shoot a roll and not see it developed for two or three months, whenever there was money for it. Later I met another American photographer living nearby in Tamanique who had a darkroom in his house and developed a few rolls for me before he left again. That’s how I got my first surf photos, nothing I’d call quality work, but they were mine, shot on a fully analog camera with black-and-white film.
What was it like shooting at Punta Roca during the civil war?
Almost no one came to Punta Roca back then. It was a tense, dangerous time. We were in the middle of a war, though it didn’t hit La Libertad as hard as other places. Even so, I felt safe; people knew me. What worried me more was that the camera was borrowed. When I developed my first roll, almost everything came out black, badly exposed. That hit me hard, but I got another roll and kept going. Film was extremely hard to come by so I relied on people giving it to me as gifts. My friend the priest later gave me a photography book in English laying out exposure, shutter speed, ISO, but I struggled to connect it all. There was no internet, so I searched every magazine I could find for anything about photography.
What was it like moving from film to digital?
I started at my first newspaper in El Salvador in the early 1990s, still shooting film. Once I really understood the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, ISO, composition, and focus, it was like discovering another world, no more photos that were too dark or blown out. The shift to digital itself was genuinely hard, though after so many years on analog, I wasn’t used to seeing results on a screen instead of printed paper, and it meant needing new resources, like a computer. Fortunately I’d always worked at local Salvadoran newspapers, and they provided the cameras, lenses, and computers, which made the adjustment easier. Today digital is the best thing that’s happened to this work. I compose in the camera, look for the right angle depending on whether a surfer is regular or goofy-footed, and if I don’t like a shot, I check it immediately and try again. Before digital tech that simply wasn’t possible. Back in the analog days, working the sports section covering soccer, I had no idea whether a shot had come out until we developed the negative.
How would you describe yourself as a photographer today?
I’m a surf photographer. I specialize in surfing. I’m a local of Puerto de La Libertad, and Punta Roca was one of the first beaches I ever visited, so I consider myself a local of Punta Roca too. I never imagined building a career out of it. When I started, there were no photographers specializing in the sport — I was practically the only one who sat on those rocks taking photos, often without knowing who most of the surfers even were. I do other kinds of photography too, but surf is my specialty, because I love it.
Who were the first surfers you photographed?
Mostly South Americans. The ones I got to know, mainly through language, were Martín Passeri, the Argentine, and Gabriel Villarán from Peru. There was also Magnum Martínez who was Venezuelan, very skilled, and Gary Saavedra, the Panamanian, among others. Those were practically the first surfers I learned to recognize when they came to La Libertad for competitions.
What was surfing’s reputation in El Salvador when you started?
The truth is, El Salvador is a soccer country. At first, surfing wasn’t seen in a good light. People called surfers bums, said it wasn’t a real profession, with no future. When I started working in the media, I pushed hard to get my sports editors to cover surf championships and not just soccer. Soccer was still what people cared about most, but that’s changed. Today there’s much more promotion for surfing, thanks to all the events being held.
How did the war, and later the gangs, affect life on the coast?
The war left behind a lot of pain and instability but El Salvador managed to move forward. Then a new problem emerged: gangs, armed groups made up of Salvadorans harming their fellow Salvadorans. In some ways that was harder, because the threat could be a neighbor right next door. That created insecurity not just for those of us living here, but for the foreigners and tourists drawn by our waves. That’s different now.
Very different! Like with the tech, what’s your approach to editing, and what are your thoughts about using AI?
Even with how advanced technology is now, it’s become easy to pass off an AI-generated image as one actually captured on location. Personally, I don’t like that. I don’t use AI. I edit my own photos and put my own touch on them: the color, the style, the crop. On Instagram I favor vertical photography, since that’s what suits the platform, and I try to leave enough space in the frame for everything to fit. Beyond the maneuver itself, I like to highlight the size of the wave, the full context, not just the surfer in isolation. But no, I really don’t use AI. I haven’t learned it, and I don’t want to, for now.
What did the Surf City initiative mean to you?
When President Bukele announced Surf City, it genuinely surprised me. And it was a joy, I thought, finally, someone is going to put real emphasis on surfing. I had some doubts at first, but when he appointed Morena Valdéz as Tourism Minister, I felt reassured. I knew her and thought she was the right person for it. The beaches and the waves were always here; what hadn’t happened yet was Salvadorans recognizing them as a treasure. Foreigners had discovered our waves long before we did. Once Surf City got underway, more people started to realize the potential we had, genuinely world-class waves, good weather, and Salvadorans who are welcoming people, open to anyone who wants to come and enjoy the country.