Great Lakes Surfing: Mike Calabro on Photography, Mental Health, and Lake Michigan

This spotlight brings us to Chicago, Illinois, where we caught up with Mike Calabro. Mike has spent decades chasing waves across Lake Michigan, where freezing temperatures, unpredictable conditions, and industrial shorelines make every session an adventure. A commercial and editorial photographer by trade, his work has taken him around the world documenting outdoor adventure, but some of his most meaningful experiences have happened close to home on the Great Lakes.

In this Spotlight, Mike shares how surfing helped him navigate depression, why Lake Michigan continues to pull him back despite the hardships, and what it's like being part of a tight-knit surf community in one of the most unexpected places to ride waves. We were inspired by his resilience, honesty, and ability to find beauty where most people never think to look.

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Q. Can you briefly introduce yourself?

Mike - I’m Mike Calabro, a fifty something commercial/editorial photographer based in Chicago. I mostly shoot outdoor adventure sports, motorcycle travel, boating, and other activities that help large corporations convert human joy into quarterly revenue. It’s not the most noble career on earth, but it pays the bills and has dragged me to all 50 states and six continents on someone else’s dime.

I grew up partly in Whiting Indiana, which is on the south end of Lake Michigan in a heavily industrialized area infested with oil refineries, steel mills, and other large facilities that have spent decades dumping toxic shit into the lake.

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with a slow-growing cancer that has trashed my immune system. So now I use that as a partially legitimate excuse to work as little as possible and surf, skate, and climb as much as possible until I can’t.

Q. How did you first get into surfing, and what has kept you coming back despite the cold, unpredictable conditions of the Great Lakes?

Mike - My parents had the normal kind of marriage: the divorced kind. It was around 1981 when I first found out you could surf on the lake. I remember seeing people surfing Lake Michigan on drives between my mom’s place just across the Chicago/Indiana border and my dad’s place in Chicago.

I didn’t actually get a surfboard until middle school. Around 1987, some kid traded me a tiny potato-chip board he got on vacation in Florida for a skateboard from my skateboard shop. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d ride my little Honda Spree scooter to the lake with a surfboard tucked under my arm, wearing my stepdad’s uber-stiff Jacques Cousteau Aqualung beavertail wetsuit. People stared. I didn’t blame them.

Whether that counts as “starting surfing” is debatable. I mostly froze, flailed, and confused people. I didn’t know what a surfable wave even looked like. I probably stood up a few times for half a second before falling off and entering the first stage of hypothermic enlightenment.

I went to grad school in the Bay Area and lived there until 2002, mostly in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. I had a few Australian coworkers I would attempt to surf with at Ocean Beach before work. In hindsight, I think they may have hated me. I couldn’t even make the paddle out. I was a total liability, a complete idiot, and I still have no idea why they kept inviting me.

I didn’t really become competent on the lake until the early 2000s, after I moved back to Chicagoland and was living in my shitty van. If I’m trying to sound cool, I can say I’ve been surfing since the late ’80s. But if I were taking a lie detector test, I’d have to say I’ve been surfing since the late 90’s/early 2000’s.

What keeps me coming back is that the lake is unreliable, abusive, beautiful, stupid, and perfect. You wait. You get a PhD in meteorology from Google University. You freeze. You get skunked. Then once in a while, the lake turns on and you get surprisingly good waves with just you and a tight-knit group of friends, and suddenly all the dumb parts seem almost reasonable.

Q. How did your interest in photography begin, and how has it evolved alongside your surfing?

Mike - Photography came through skateboarding and snowboarding. I knew I wanted to stay around those worlds, and once I finally stopped lying to myself and admitted I was not going pro, photography became the way to stay in the industry.

I went to photography school, got a gig with a snowboard company in Montana after my undergrad, and later wound up at California State Hayward for my graduate degree. I stumbled into some cool tech-boom jobs. I worked for Sega, where I somehow became a secret hidden character in a snowboard video game, and later worked for an awesome sports website called Quokka.

Quokka was way ahead of its time. I was the lead designer and got to work on projects like the Sydney Olympics, live-ish webcasts from Mount Everest, and a bunch of other outdoor/adventure projects.

Quokka also sponsored an expedition for some of the first people ever to surf in Antarctica. We sent Steve Hawk, Chris Malloy, and legendary surf photographer Art Brewer down there for what became one of the first surf expeditions to Antarctica.

After the dot-com bust happened, I went back to my love and went 100% into photography. Clients started sending me around the world which enable me to surf some great places on someone else’s dime.

 

Q. How does being in or around the water, whether you’re surfing or shooting, impact your mood and mindset?

Mike - It keeps my brain from going off the rails.

That sounds dramatic, but I don’t really know how else to say it. Chicago winters are brutal. I’ve dealt with serious depression, and winter can be a psychological torture chamber.

I grew up a few blocks from the lake. My mom had a boat shop when I was a kid. Being around water has always been my comfort place.

When I’m in or near the water, the noise in my head gets simpler. I am not doom-scrolling or arguing with ghosts or narrating my own decline.

For me, immersion in the lake isn't some spiritual, New Age "cleansing" ritual. It's basic neurological triage.

And honestly, that’s enough.

Q. What’s the Chicago surf community like, and what makes it unique?

Mike - There’s been a big influx of younger surfers in the city, but I don’t really hang with that crew much. My crew is mostly guys from the Southend Surf Club, which has been around for over 30 years.

They’re a beautiful, bizarre microcosm of the Midwest consisting mostly of tough blue-collar workers. Many have been charging the lakes since the early ’90s, and a few have been out there since the ’70s, back when wetsuits sucked, information was scarce, and surfing Lake Michigan in winter was less of a sport and more of a group psychiatric episode.

Back then, you had to look out for each other. The conditions were dangerous, the gear was worse, and nobody outside that tiny circle really understood what we were doing. That kind of thing bonds people. It made us feel a little like war buddies, except instead of combat we were fighting hypothermia, frostbite, and our own poor judgment.

Over time, that crew became a close family. We heckle each other, protect each other, and show up for each other’s weddings and funerals.

The scene has changed a lot, especially since the pandemic. Like a lot of surf communities, we’ve seen more people, more confusion, more etiquette problems, and more guys surfing with GoPros in their mouths looking to become YouTube famous. New blood keeps things alive, but the old Southend crew came out of a different era, when the lake was colder, the gear was worse, and nobody was doing it for content. This has caused some friction in the water.

Q. You’ve spoken about the industrial presence along Lake Michigan. How has pollution impacted your experience as a Great Lakes surfer, and what have you personally witnessed?

Mike - A lot of us try to ignore it, because otherwise you’d never surf. But that gets hard when there’s oil stuck to your feet, dead fish in the water, or you come home with eye, ear, throat, stomach, or skin issues. It’s normal to be excited when you can tell your friends that the smell of diesel is not that bad today.

When U.S. Steel had the infamous hexavalent chromium spill, the Erin Brockovich chemical, my friends and I were surfing there the next day. The public warnings were late, vague, and useless. The news said beaches were shut down immediately, but we didn’t see a single warning sign until five days after the poison leaked into the water. Another time, the water was carpeted with dead fish. We found out later there had been a massive cyanide leak.

BP Whiting is another huge part of the story. The Environmental Integrity Project, working with Surfrider, reported that BP discharged millions of pounds of pollutants into Lake Michigan in 2021, including oil and grease, arsenic, nickel, benzene, and other garbage nobody wants in their mouth. The same report said BP violated its Clean Water Act permit for five straight quarters from 2019 to 2020 and had a 2014 spill of up to 1,638 gallons of oil into the lake.

So yes, pollution changes the experience. You’re not just checking wind, period, and water level. You’re also wondering: Did something spill? Will I get a rash? Is that smell normal industrial death-fart, or a special event? And the extra scary part is that there’s no regular public water testing during peak surf season, when the beaches are closed, so we often have no clue what’s happening.

I love Lake Michigan. I love the south end. But loving a place doesn’t mean pretending the companies next to it are harmless. Some of my friends and family from that area have had cancer. My mom and aunt died of cancer. I can’t prove every illness came from that shoreline, and I’m not going to pretend I can. But I grew up in that water. My family grew up around that water. When you’ve spent your life next to refineries, steel mills, and discharge pipes, concern isn’t paranoia. It’s common sense.

 

Q. There are areas in Chicago where surfing is restricted or banned. What do those limitations look like today, and how has the local surf community responded over time?

Mike - It doesn’t really affect me too much. The newer surfers on the scene seem to love surfing in the city, but I usually prefer other spots.

Chicago banned flotation devices a billion years ago. I don’t recall the full story, but I think it started after some kids drowned when a small inflatable got blown way offshore.

In 2008, my buddy Jack Flynn became the first surfer arrested in Chicago. The cops held him overnight, still in his full winter wetsuit, in a cell with guys who had just robbed a bank. That arrest helped spark Surfrider Chicago’s push to overturn the city’s old surf ban, which finally changed in 2009 and opened up a few beaches. Jack had another run-in with the law a few years later for surfing in the city.

It happened again in 2012. I had to bail out my friend Rex after he was arrested for surfing at Oak Street Beach in Chicago. When I went to the cop shop to pick him up, the desk cop made a disgusting comment about how they were going to keep him in there for a while because “the boys” were going to rape him in that tight little suit he was wearing. It was pure prehistoric caveman shit from the authorities. Rex’s arrest made national headlines and exposed how ridiculous the policy still was.

Today, surfing is allowed at a handful of designated beaches, but access is still limited and confusing. Surfrider Chicago is had a community paddle-out on the 17th to mark the 17th anniversary of surfing legalization in Chicago.

Q. You’re involved with the Chicago chapter of Surfrider Foundation. How has that work contributed to improving water quality and advocating for better surf access?

Mike - After the beach-ban fights and years of corporate dumping, the Chicago chapter has helped hold companies like U.S. Steel and BP accountable through legal pressure, water testing, public comments, and policy work.

That matters because surfers are basically unpaid water-quality sensors. We’re out there when nobody else is. We see the slicks, smell the weird stuff, get the rashes, and notice when the lake feels wrong. Surfrider gives that experience some organizational muscle. It turns “my skin is itchy after surfing next to a steel mill” from a parking-lot anecdote into testimony, legal pressure, and public record.

The chapter has also worked with legal and environmental advocates around pollution from industrial facilities on the south end, including the U.S. Steel hexavalent chromium releases. Surfrider, represented by the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, was involved in legal action after the 2017 spill.

I don’t think Surfrider solves everything. No nonprofit swoops in wearing a wetsuit cape and defeats industrial pollution with a reusable water bottle. But it gives the community a way to push back. And around here, pushing back matters, because the polluters have lawyers, lobbyists, permits, and decades of inertia. Surfers are on the frontline and have enough collective anger to become a real pain in the ass.

Q. Do you have a favorite photo you’ve taken that you can share, along with the story behind it?

Mike - I don’t really have one favorite photo. When the waves are good, I prefer to be in the water than behind the lens.

Years ago, I did a series of close-up portraits of surfers emerging from the lake covered in massive, frozen icicles. The "ice beard" series went viral and ended up all over mainstream media like Outside Magazine. At the time, it was pretty neat, but now the whole ice-beard aesthetic has been completely played out and copied to death.

I suppose my favorite shots are things the general public probably won’t dig because they lack mainstream commercial appeal. They’re a series of hyper-stylized, high-contrast black and white series I’ve been working on. It’s more of what I like to think of as my fine art work. Through abstract tweakage, the waves lose their liquid identity and end up looking like stark, cosmic fields of the nighttime sky. It’s artsy, borderline pretentious nonsense, but it captures the existential isolation of the lake much better than a viral gimmick.

Q. What advice would you give to someone traveling to Chicago looking to score a wave?

Mike - Luck. Pure, unadulterated, astrological luck. And low expectations.

Great Lakes surfing is not a vacation activity. We don’t have reliable swell from storms thousands of miles away. Lake Michigan is only about 300-plus miles long, so forecasting here is completely different from forecasting the ocean. You’re mostly watching local wind, fetch, water level, and how fast the whole thing is going to mutate into some new disappointing little goblin by morning.

I don’t put much trust in anything until the night before, and even then, things change. You can think it’s a sure thing, then end up wasting a tank of gas and ending up standing in a parking lot, questioning your life. I’ve been surfing the lakes for decades and still get skunked.

If you’re coming here to surf, connect with someone local, be humble, don’t blow up spots, don’t paddle straight into the pack, and understand that freshwater waves are weird. They’re short-period, shifty, and often less organized than ocean swell.

You’re not in Malibu. You’re in a giant inland sea with seasonal affective disorder, questionable water quality, and possibly a ticket or cancer waiting for you if you pick the wrong beach.

 

Q. Where can people learn more about your photography?

Mike - My website is urbancamper.com, and I’m on Instagram at @urbancamperphoto.