The Lifeguard Project
Life altering moments go unnoticed daily.
Read that again…
Lifeguards navigate a serious career of risks and stark consequences guised by the wake of Hollywood interpretations which plague the profession. Lifeguarding is consistently undermined for it’s grit, passion, culture, history, and diverse challenges.
The essence of lifeguarding is service and awareness, interrupted by fleeting moments of fear and heroism. You don’t have to be working as a lifeguard to experience and connect with the essence of lifeguarding.
Lifeguarding is for everyone. We are all guardians of life-experience.
If you have experienced a medical emergency, death, or water related distress, you are simultaneously closer to the understanding of LIFE. One becomes closer attuned through events which deploy perception into the present moment, and wrap minds with a new outlook on the future, and on life.
Lifeguards line up with the sunrise before an intensive training swim during a lifeguard academy.
The Lifeguard Project shares incredible stories which promote lifeguarding in an artistic way. It explains the profession through the respect that it yearns… and deserves. It aims to educate and inspire everyone through documenting innately captivating experiences which invoke a unique awareness of life.
The Lifeguard Project exists to activate future generations, improve the perception of lifeguarding, and facilitate life-perspective for the better.
The first of its kind.
Limiting the perception of the duties to the lifeguard “tanning“ in the tower is can not just be misconstrued as disrespectful, but it identifies a lack of awareness.
But I digress…
Why do this?
Why lifeguarding?
Why now?
Images of lifeguarding have existed as reverberations of the Baywatch aesthetic giving false pretense of what the job truly entails. Summertime, tanning, sunscreen, slow motion running IS NOT lifeguarding. Modern day social media attempts to captivate the profession for promotion as filtered by your local HR department. Maybe a lifeguard your follow has a blurry image during a real event, perhaps a local stringer photographer got lucky with with a chance at glory.
But there is so much more…
A 16 year old lifeguard poses for a portrait on California’s Central Coast.
Lifeguards work from age 16 into their 70’s.
Lifeguards in Humboldt enter the 47°F (8°C) water as they qualify for a position during the first swim tryout in that area.
They work during the winter.
A lifeguard covers his eyes as a helicopter lifts off during a 911 call in the desert.
They work in the deserts.
Lifeguards work on every continent in the world.
Lifeguards are the feeder program for your community police, fire, and EMS. They are the doctor and lawyer with a “weekend job”. They work in your coffee shop, your local bar, before and after their shift. They are travelers, students, teachers, and parents. Check their payscale and you will see why they need two jobs, ask the chiefs and you will hear about how low staffing is affecting the tensions of providing high quality beach safety.
Lifeguards are stewards of life, aware of it’s cruel tendencies, and in-tune to it’s beautiful patterns.
Few know the intimacy of the profession, but everyone can learn from it. I want people to learn what lifeguards can do and how the ocean works. This simultaneously correlates to preventing injury and drowning. The profession builds positive observations of the human condition, builds connection to a community, and promotes care for human life/experience. Things which tend to get overlooked in the infinite chaos of the modern world.
I want for the world to connect over this thing called life, as Life-GUARDING does.
Follow along and give these stories a glance. Let’s build understanding, an expanded awareness, or just pay them a couple extra bucks an hour. Theres so much more to it than anyone knows, even lifeguards.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, thats the thing we never get back. Spend it wisely!
Respectfully,
