NORTH SKATEBOARD MAGAZINE
ISSUE 08
BUSENITZ PRO
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From Dirt to Dust book and Out of Steppe documentary available now! Photography: Percy Dean and Cyrille Weiner / Writing: Seb Carayol / Cinematography: Stephen Roe / Featured Skateboarders: Joseph Biais, Jerome Campbell, Igor Fardin, SylvainTognelli, Yoshihiro “Deshi” Omoto and Phil Zwijsen
Ten years after, skateboarding the urban revolution of Mongolia (2004 –14)
www.carhartt-wip.com Jerome Campbell, BS wallride – Photos Percy Dean & Cyrille Weiner
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For the first time in twenty years I didn’t know where to go. It’s always been a home from home, a place to meet up, catch up, and skate. I shot so many photos there over the years that I decided to stop completely. It wasn’t until the news that it was finally happening that I wanted to shoot there again. It’s funny how that happens. The news that it’s gone isn’t really news anymore, but it’s still hard to take. Despite this, the last few weeks were great. It was rad to see everyone from various eras of skateboarding come together to celebrate this place. I’m glad I was able to get in there and shoot a few last photos before it was gone. I’m going to look back fondly on my time skating and shooting there. - Bristo Square R.I.P Graham Tait Editor/Photographer Keith Allan - FS Bluntslide
Cover: Graham Anderson - Nollie BS Tailslide Photographer: Graham Tait
Contents
Miles Kondracki Still Shooting On Film Oliver Barton
The Cons One Star Pro x Sean Pablo
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Miles Kondracki Photography by Graham Tait Interview by Kieron Forbes
After knowing you for quite some time and knowing that you had a Polish background, I only found out recently you have Sudanese heritage - the whole story is pretty crazy. Do you want to tell me it again? Well, my Gran on my Mum’s side is from Lanarkshire and when she was younger she went out to the Sudan to volunteer and teach English. She ended up with a boyfriend, and after a while of being there, they got attacked and shot at by rebels. Her boyfriend was shot and died and my Gran ended up with a bullet in her wrist for the rest of her life. So she could have died as well? Yeah, well I think they didn’t want to kill her because she was British. So eventually she got to know her boyfriend’s brother after the family looked after her. They ended up getting married and that’s my Grandad. Or was my Grandad.
I was thinking after the first time you told me that story that it was a total fluke your Gran and Grandad got together because your Gran easily could have been killed; as simple as a bullet hitting her head not her wrist. Not everyone has that sort of knowledge about their past. Definitely, it’s a crazy series of events. What’s also crazy is My Dad’s Dad, who was born in Poland and served in the Polish Free Army during WW2 as a paratrooper, jumped from a plane and his parachute didn’t open and he broke his back. They actually thought he couldn’t walk again because it was that bad. He spent six months in a plastercast in England. After the war he came to Scotland and met my Grandmother. So basically the break down is that your Mum’s Mum and your Dad’s Dad both almost died, and not just casual brushes with death like sickness or whatever but... …shot at and jumping out a plane to find your parachute won’t open.
And you’ve never met him? No, never. He had a lot of kids with different women. They came back to the UK and it didn’t work out so my Gran ended up raising my Mum and her two sisters by herself.
Man, not everyone knows how close they were to not even being born, like the Kondracki name could have been over in a blink of an eye. Yeah, totally. I’m a lucky human being. You live fairly close to Bristo Square. When you started skating did you head straight there? Nah, we would just go to the playpark. Bomb hills on our ass and just sort of skate around in a little gang. Classic kid shit. First year of high school I started seeing some kids who could do tricks so that’s kind of what spurred me on to learn tricks or whatever.
Did you know there were tricks from playing computer games or seeing videos or did you not even know they existed? Yeah, I knew. I actually remember in Tony Hawk’s how you could ollie into a grind and just go forever, and I remember thinking that was the wildest shit and thinking, “Will I ever be able to actually do a grind?” It made no sense. When did you actually make it to Bristo, and did you realise right away that was where you wanted to hang out? Probably around six months into skating and I guess right away, although back then it was weird, you’d get vibed out pretty easily. Nowhere near how mellow it was before it closed. I remember hearing that Rick Howard compared it to EMB, which of course was notorious for vibing people out. I think towards the end there really wasn’t that many people using the space and everyone would just be hanging out: skaters, bladers, homeless people, the unicycle guy and weirdos alike. You’ve been skating there regularly for over ten years now, right? How do you feel about Bristo being torn down? Yup, since I was about thirteen. It’s sad really sad, I’ve not actually processed it yet. I miss it for sure. Usually this time of year it would be just opening after the Festival so it hasn’t sunk in because it seems just like any other year. I doubt we’re going to get to skate there once it’s redone.
No Comply
Obviously we have Saughton, but do you think the Edinburgh street skating scene can keep going without a central spot like Bristo Square? For sure, there is always going to be the dudes that don’t want to go to the skatepark and they aren’t just going to stop. I would imagine that there is always going to be a good street skating scene in Edinburgh/Scotland. In terms of video output though, there’s really not that many spots left in Edinburgh that haven’t been shut down. I actually find it hard to think of a time when I’ve skated the Square and you weren’t there; do you think that to be a good street skater having a spot that you can skate all day (like Southbank, Love Park etc.) is a necessity ?
More than one of my friends and I have agreed, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed, that you’ve had ‘it’ from a young age. Like what’s cool what’s not. Is that owed to coming up around such a group of diverse people? It’s a lot to do with them; you’d see maybe some of those guys try technically hard tricks but mostly they’d skate fast and do simple tricks and make it look good. That definitely rubbed off on me. Like Mark Murray was really charismatic and that would come through in his skating. He always looked like he was having the most fun. I’d spend a lot of time as well watching videos. Lost and Found was the first video that really had an impact on me as well as the Green Diamond video, Rich Mahogany. Was that just tricks or how people looked/dressed?
I wouldn’t say it’s a necessity, obviously it’s really advantageous to have a place like that where you can go skate and hang out all day hassle free. When you skate at these types of places every day all day, your skating is definitely going to improve quickly. Saying that though, there is the ‘vortex’ element that comes with these types of spots. It’s cool to have a place like that but you need to venture out too. As Simie would say, “Magic only happens in the streets”.
The whole video. I watched Yeah Right and Flip’s Sorry beforehand. I got those from the video shop on VHS, and that’s completely unrelatable for a 14/15 year old kid now. So when I saw Lost and Found I could relate to the low impact skating that had more emphasis on making it look good.
With Bristo being such a melting pot do you think it’s the people, the spot, or the history that defines those who skate there? I didn’t really know too much about the history, I just observed how it was at the time. Bristo just shaped people. It’s not the easiest place to skate, the ledges were already pretty beaten, even by the time I had started going there. But there were definitely people a bit older than me that made me pay attention: Alex [Johnston], Mark [Murray] and Blair [Hodge] to name a few. Basically all those dudes had their own style, which was rad because they were all amazing at skating, but each of them in their own way.
Wallie
Weather Permitting was your first full part. How did you find the filming process? It was fun and it was a good experience. It was after I got put on the Focus team and then Zander messaged me right after saying he was doing the video. I was happy with the part I put out. I’ve been filming with Simie for Street Snacks Volume 3 and that’s been super mellow. With Zander it would be more often just me and him with one trick in mind sort of, “We’re out to get this done”, and if it didn’t happen we would both be really bummed because we went out with the intention of doing that one trick. I was out with you for a few of the photos in this interview and you were saying the same thing. Yeah, it’s a bit too business-like if it’s just you and the filmer/ photographer, even if you are good friends. Where do you see skating going for you in the future? I’m just planning to skate with my friends and keep getting boards from Harvest. I also want to travel a bunch.
So over the last five years your kit’s definitely changed quite a bit. You went from quite a clean cut type wardrobe to more of a Stig of the Dump on a bender. What are your thoughts behind people’s clothing choices? Haha! I back it. It’s really comfortable. Just look at any Jason Dill part, I remember seeing Skate More and thinking, “Why is he wearing pull up neon yellow socks with white shorts and a Mohawk?” And a pair of what looks like Lonsdale shoes in the DVS video! Ridiculous. I was a follower of the Bristo uniform when I started skating (brown cords, white t-shirt, grey hoodie). It’s so influential, especially when you’re young, you see your favourite skater wearing something and you have to get it; nowadays I just wear whatever I feel like. It can be dangerous though, like I didn’t wear deodorant for almost a year because I read Geoff Rowley didn’t, did you ever do anything like that? Haha! Not as dangerous. Just the endless search for a perfect pair of brown trousers. Skating certainly forces you to put yourself under the looking glass, you’re constantly having to define yourself. Yeah, it’s having that vision in your head of what something might look like and then what other people might perceive it as. Skateboarding is in a super judgemental period at the moment… Or maybe it’s always been that way. I think about how I want things to be, if a photo or footage turns out the way I wanted it to be I’m stoked. I don’t really care what other people think.
FS Nosegrind Pop Out Previous Page: Flip BS Lipslide Shove
Do you think that’s the key to being your own skater? Yeah, it definitely takes some thought to stand out these days. I guess your Dad (Miles’ Dad is a well known oil painter) must have the same feeling with painting and knowing what he wants finished pieces to look like? My Dad will take paintings home and he’ll be like, “I’m going to paint over this” or whatever, or “Just have this, I don’t like it”. Paintings can end up sitting in the house collecting dust. They’ll be sat in the worst place. Somewhere you could end up walking into them or knocking them over. Amazing pieces of art and he’s not that fussed about them. Do you feel that getting coverage is the same way? Once it’s done it’s done and you may not always be stoked on it later? Totally. I have found myself wanting to re-shoot or re-film things because I didn’t like the way I did it. How do you feel about the tricks you’ve shot for this interview? I guess with a video part people can see more and understand the spot and the trick. Do you feel as if the photos represent your vision and how you skate? Yeah, I’m stoked with them. It’s been a collaboration, you know? Tait is brutally honest and will tell me if he thinks something won’t work for a photo. I guess people never seem to be happy with stuff like this or video parts. “I could have got another line, etc. etc.”
Switch Crook
If you could speak to 14 year-old you now do you think you would be stoked on where you are who you are?
If you didn’t have skating do you think things would be a lot harder?
I’d hope so, I’d be stoked I’m still skating for sure. Its funny man, I see people all the time, with Edinburgh being so small, from school and stuff. They always say the same thing, I get this every time, “Oh, are you still skating?”
Ah man, I’d probably be a terrible person. You see what people are like; there’s that culture of waiting for the weekend to come so you can get as out of your face as possible. And I imagine that breaks a lot of people down. Skating is just a good outlet, it’s physical and creative there’s not many things that combine both. People struggle to understand it but you can come home from a skate and be like, “I feel good because I’ve exercised” or “I feel good because I’ve actually accomplished something”, or both. Whereas drinking you’ve got the fucking hangover the next day and you want to kill yourself, it’s not so productive. Man, I’ve had really trippy experiences especially when I’ve been stoned and you skate for maybe an hour and it’s almost like I don’t know what I was doing, honestly, it’s like an off button for your mind. It’s really healthy to have something to turn to like that when life gets stressful. The ability to forget about everything and just be in the moment, even for a short time is really valuable.
Do you feel embarrassed? Yeah, no, well not embarrassed but it’s not something I’m super loud about. It wouldn’t be the first thing I’d tell someone I met for the first time. It’s just good to sometimes not say anything, mostly all my close friends skateboard or have skateboarded so it’s good to chill with people that don’t know anything about it. It’s sick though, you can keep it low key and have a double life.
I think you nailed it... Is there anyone you’d like to thank whilst you’ve got the chance? My parents and my two brothers. All of my close friends. Yourself [Kieron Forbes], Jamie Johnson and Harvest. Sibs, Gillian, Graham Tait and Focus. Simie Simpson and Zander Ritchie. Also, I want to say thank you to Matt Nelmes.
Wallride Nollie
TOM REMILLARD
Still Shooting On Film
Graham Tait / Daniel Nicholas / Truck Blunt
Graham Tait / Freddie Lusk / FS 5.0
Graham Tait / Paul Regan / BS Tailslide
Graham Tait / Ross Zajac / FS 50-50
Graham Tait / Charlie Myatt / BS Noseblunt Transfer
Friedjof Feye / Dennis Laass / Wallride
Paul Coutherut / John Franco / Ollie
Paul Coutherut / Bobby Brazen / FS Nosegrind
Jeremy Scruto / Stevie Clark / Boneless
Adam Thirtle / Myles Rushforth / FS 180
Alberto Polo / Javier Mendizabal / BS Disaster
Alex Massotti / FS Boardslide
Sam Roberts / Toby Shaw / Kickflip
Liam Annis / Brian Reid / Nose Manual
Jason LeCras / Jake Johnson / Ollie
Bruno / NYC
Robert Christ / Martin Huppertz / BS Flip
Jack Curtin
Robert Christ / Thomas Gietl / BS 180 Nosegrind
Patrick Kleiner / Koni Rutschmann / Ollie
JON SCIANO
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“This is my Hasselblad 203fe with a 30mm CFi Distagon fisheye bayoneted to the front, A-12 film back snapped on the back and a PM45 view finder slotted on top. This particular 203fe, which was used to shoot the photos in this feature, has been with me since 2008 and has has quite an illustrious past. Its two previous owners used it to shoot all sorts of gnarly photos, from the original DC Mega Ramp to early 2000s East Coast gems. The value of a camera is normally rated in terms of resolving power, focusing systems and wifi capabilities, and yet this Swedish lump from 1994 isn’t much more than a light-tight box with some German glass at one end and a roll of Japanese film at the other. The years have not always been kind to her, skatelife in the streets is a far cry from the cosy studios that Victor Hasselblad design her for. But despite the years, and all that numerical pressure from the new kids on the block, this camera still has some valuable opinions it wants to express, so here it is: skateboarding through the eyes of my ageing 203fe in 2015.”
Oliver Barton Photography by Oliver Barton Interview by Stephen Cox
Hi Oliver, what’s up?
Are you going to push him into skating or photography?
Bit of a late start today. I got back last night at about 3.30.
Haha! When my dad was my age there was such a course in life, where if you studied hard and got your degree then you could probably get a pretty good job and then work your way up through a firm. I feel like that entire structure has really been turned on its head in the last ten years and that I have so little of an idea what is going to be relevant by the time he gets to the point of needing a job. I would much rather he made that decision, I have no understanding of how things work now let alone in another fifteen years. The other day I was thinking about whether or not he would even need to learn to handwrite. I don’t do it at all anymore. That first day at school in September when your hand is just killing you because you haven’t written for months, but after a few days you can knock out several thousand words no problem; now you sign your signature and your hand gets stiff. The game will have really changed by the time he gets to that point in his life.
Hungover? I wish. No, we went down to San Diego to skate some spots. We went to this town just south of San Diego. A good three-hour drive back. You’re wide awake after that. Who were you skating with? Chris Joslin, Matt Berger and Jamie Tancowny. When you’re down south there you really start to feel like you’re in a different country. It’s funny though, I remember when I first started coming out here people used to say, “Oh, you must know [Mark] Baines”. I’d say he was one of my best friends but I didn’t get to see him as much as I would like because he lived so far away. Then they’d ask how far away he lived and I’d explain that if you were really going for it in the car you could make it from London in two hours and forty-five minutes. I was always met with puzzled faces because here in America we’ll easily drive that far for one spot then turn straight back around and head back home. It’s a bit different with the motorways here, they’re way bigger so you don’t hit as much congestion. Well that’s not actually true, you do hit traffic too. I guess it’s just a different mentality. How’s the little one coming along then? He’s one now. When they hit this age it’s really good because they start interacting more, they’re less like a plant or something where you’re just feeding them and watching them grow without too much feedback!
How has having a son affected your work? I consciously try to take everything as it comes and see everything as having an advantage even if it seems like a disadvantage at first. If you read that book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which I really liked, it has lots of stories where people have found themselves in what at first appears to be a disadvantageous situation and actually becomes their defining strength. Once you’ve got a kid you have to structure things a little bit more because everything has a time frame now. I feel like in the past I never pushed for things to happen and preferred for things to be organic but now it’s a little bit more on the other side and generally speaking I’ve found that we all need a little nudge every now and then. Now that I’m out a little bit less I feel like people take advantage of my time a bit more though which is good because I hate going back to spots at a later date, there always seems to be something weird with the light when you go back, some strange issue that didn’t exist before and you know in your heart that the photo would’ve looked better if you’d shot it the first time around. So having a son is a benefit then, if anything. Definitely. The other thing as well is that skating in California is really tough sometimes, you can be out skating all night getting kicked out of everywhere by police who you don’t really trust and you come home with no tricks at the end of several hundred miles of driving, it can get a bit miserable at times. When you come home from that and you play with your kids, you can switch off from that, you go straight from “Does that cop think my tripod bag has a rifle inside?” to Rescue Bot wars and bottles of milk, it’s great, you get the balance back a bit. When you’ve been doing something for a really long time you become conscious that you can’t burn yourself out on it and that’s really easy Photography by Kazuhiro Terauchi to do in California, there’s just not as much magic in the Interview by Graham Tait like Barcelona or London so my boys streets as a place keep everything level.
Let’s hear a bit about you growing up in Jersey. Your dad skated and surfed didn’t he? Because Jersey is the first part of Europe - except for Ireland - where the weather that has travelled across the Atlantic hits a coastline, there’s massive surf there, especially in the winter. Full blown do-or-die waves on offshore reefs; you’ve got to be a full warrior to play that game, it’s a lot like the film Dark Side Of The Lens that Mickey Smith put out. There’s a really big surfing culture there and skateboarding naturally rolls along with that. My dad always had a board laying around and skated a lot because he was really into surfing too, when I first got into skating he took me to a hill that he used to skate down with his mates and I’d skate down it and he would drive me back up in the car. He still has a board with clay wheels, it’s Neolithic! When we were probably ten years old, my friend Ian [Battrick] went to holiday to Disneyland in Florida and he came back with a Santa Cruz Jeff Grosso, and everything about that set up looked amazing. His dad built him a quarterpipe in his garage and you know, it’s really weird, different people choose to get into different things at different times in their lives because they need to get fit or they move somewhere new but with skateboarding there was just something that connected with me on a far more profound level than consciously choosing one day “I’m going to get into tennis because my new girlfriend likes to play”. I just thought about it the whole time, from that day that was it for me. I wasn’t interested in football or anything else after that. I’m the youngest of five kids and my parents worked long hours so it was really hard to get a lift to football games or anything like that anyway, so skating was right there out the front door for me.
Julian Dividson - Fakie Ollie Switch Crook
Ian is actually a really well known surfer now. He’s funny because I would imagine that the best thing about being a professional surfer is getting to go to Tahiti and all these exotic places with warm crystal clear waters and eat fish in the evenings cooked in banana leaves and coconut milk, but he’s into surfing really cold places like Iceland. He’s a really amazing surfer. Looking back I realise that it’s so different growing up in Jersey compared to mainland Britain, so it’s probably not that strange that we both ended up doing what we do. Let’s clear up the Transworld situation. You’re not shooting for them anymore? What happened? Transworld was started by Larry Balma thirty-two years ago and he ran it independently as his own publishing house. He was clever and sold up to Time Warner at a really good time when print was dominant. That started the cycle of lots of people buying and selling Transworld like you would with a house. Investors want a return so they just try and cut down on as much staff as possible while relying on freelancers to keep the overall running costs down and overall profits up, irrespective of that being a sustainable business model or not. If you’re a private investor or something like that you probably don’t have any emotional attachment to a print magazine about skateboarding, you’d probably not be a very good businessman if you did, so with the tough economic climate facing print companies these days, it makes some sense to trim what you think you can and the photographers are always the first to go. The day before myself, Mike O’Meally and Sam Muller stopped working there I saw that Sports Illustrated had laid off all eleven of their staff photographers so I knew doomsday was really close.
Trent McClung - BS Tailslide
Transworld Skate was actually the last in the building out of Surf, Snow, BMX and all of that which had still had staff photographers so they held onto us until the very last moment, no hard feelings, it’s just pretty symptomatic of how media works at the moment. Will it stay that way? I wouldn’t say it’s going to stay like that but photographers will have to represent their value in a few different mediums than just print in order to make themselves worth keeping on, but I do think the pendulum is swinging back. People have always wanted to have an authentic connection with a media company, they want to know who is telling them what the cool shit is right now and believe in that source, not an article from someone whose name they don’t know. It’s one of those balancing out periods, where everything is a little upside-down at the moment but hopefully it will come back, it’s the same in most creative fields, everyone just plays it a bit safe these days which is why we’re seeing huge investment in franchises like Terminator 4 and Star Wars but hardly any in original script movies. It got me to thinking about when I spoke to Chris [Thiessen], who told me how heavily involved you were with Outliers and the previous video too. Has that aspect of working with Transworld passed then? Yeah. I actually started filming before I ever shot photos, I filmed a lot of stuff for Blueprint the whole time I was shooting with everyone back then. I’ve always had that love for filming and the Transworld video department have had in their legacy some of the most influential filmers of skateboarding that there is; whether it’s Jon Holland, Jason Hernandez or Greg Hunt, I’ve always been a fan of Transworld videos and how they evolved with each different filmer.
It’s an overused word, but it really was an honour to help make a Transworld video, knowing the names that had gone before you was definitely a motivator. The end product feels like an achievement, but to be honest, some parts of the making of a video are really arduous. Clearing the music will drive you insane even with the help of an agent, the people who get to make videos that don’t have to clear the music have no idea how much pain they’re missing out on! Always sounds like a nightmare. It’s really difficult because there aren’t really any guidelines to it. The way Transworld clears music means that all the artists get paid exactly the same, it’s unionised, so you can’t spend big on one track and then make it up with another cheap one, everyone gets paid the same. At one point Riley Hawk wanted Pink Floyd so I called the music-clearing agency and they laughed, “We don’t even bother contacting Pink Floyd if it’s anything less than $100,000”. I said, “So no mega bands? That’s funny cause I noticed Wieger [Van Wageningen] skated to David Bowie in the Nike video. Was that really expensive?” “Oh no, Bowie is easy. I can clear Bowie all day for next to nothing, he’s into it”. So you don’t know whether to go for small bands or big bands and sometimes at the end, someone will change their mind at the last moment, like the day after the premiere. For John Cardiel’s part, Jon Holland had edited his whole part to Sizzla but he couldn’t get in touch with his label; a few days before the premiere he drove to a Sizzla concert on a Hail Mary and somehow made it back stage and got Sizzla to sign on the spot, such a mission. I’m not going to miss that part but it was a great to be part of a well-rounded video like Outliers. I think the distribution of videos is going to change a lot in the next few years as well so that could change the music issue.
No full-lengths? Already they’re rare enough. In 2007 there was a Transworld award for best two video parts of the year. I think it was November 2007 there was the Lakai video, Osiris video, Inhabitants, the Birdhouse video, Nike video... It was a good year to be in the DVD reproducing game! All these videos were just coming out at the same time but in 2015, before the Vans video I can’t think of the last big video that came out. The more skate companies become sophisticated with their marketing strategies, the more they want to do shorter video projects that are related to a specific product they’re selling. So for example, instead of seeing Torey Pudwill bring out a full video part you’ll see a shorter commercial of him skating for the release of the Plan B Black Ice boards or something. Going back to what you said about filming, why did photography come first? I was supposed to do ancient history and archeology at uni then I took a year out. My dad gave me his old camera and I got into photography and taking photos. I liked history and archeology at school because the teacher was really good, he really made the subject come alive, but when I came to realise I would be in lectures with a hundred and fifty people, and after the travelling, I didn’t really fancy it. It was actually my dad that suggested I could do photography as a degree. I wanted to do it then maybe afterwards change to something that I could use to get a job. I realise now that it’s not even possible to take a path like that and expect a job at the end, but at the time it was a done thing. Nowadays the barista at my mum’s local coffee shop actually has a masters in engineering but he can’t get a job anywhere so he’s making cappuccinos trying to pay off his student debt, it’s crazy. Reggie Kelly - FS 360
I was really into photography as a hobby at the time and I honestly thought it would be an easier, funner degree so I just sort of fell into it. It definitely wasn’t the most conscious of decisions. Through all that time I was filming too, the degree was film photography and digital arts so I did a lot of 16mm films too. Working with 16mm film cameras is brilliant, just the sound of the film going through the gate is really cool. It’s great that people like Greg Hunt still film 16mm – there’s some in the Vans video – the look of it is really special. Everything about it is hard though, the exposure, setting it up, even loading the film in the camera is really difficult. When we spoke a while back you mentioned that you wished photographers could get the same sort of budgets that videographers get sometimes. We see it with Ty Evans and the like. As far as the video stuff is concerned, Brain Farm is an actual production company where they sort of use this Francis Ford Coppola model where you try and do big commercial work to fund your fun time. Brain Farm do Toyota commercials and stuff like that and then dump all the profit into more personal projects that they really want to do. They’re not putting any icing on their cake with the income from any of those personal projects. I’d love to use the photographic equivalent of some of the cameras that Brain Farm have, but the skateboarding community is so fickle, it can be as appreciative of the mega movies as it is of a video part filmed on mobile phone so the gear doesn’t guarantee anything.
Torey Pudwill - BS Overcrook
It seems like there’s a whole lot more to worry about when it comes to print in terms of an audience being able to appreciate and view the photos in an acceptable format. It’s hilarious how as the resolution of the cameras that skateboarding is being filmed on goes up, the size of the screens we’re watching it on is shrinking! It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, album art has changed so much from designing for a 12” record sleeve to something that needs to be eye catching on an iPod screen. I’m down for the evolution, I just don’t like it when people think something new means better. I think at the moment people are so caught up in connecting with people as directly as possible with something being available immediately meaning innovation that people have lost track of the fact that quality will always outweigh speed of delivery - it’s skateboarding, not a pizza! Some companies only want to put out their videos digitally so they can track who is watching them, then they can say, “We had this many downloads from Brazil. We need to concentrate on this market”. It’s a lot of short-term gains without long-term strategy. I think it’s cool that we can see more skateboarding now than ever before but the quality has undeniably dropped, there’s so much volume you can live in your own little area of skateboarding bubble without ever having to check something else out. The thing I love about magazines is that you might go round to someone’s house and they have a magazine laying around that you’ve not seen before, you pick it up and you can’t choose the content, it’s what the editor thought was good, so you might end up taking notice of someone or something that you’d have skipped past if you had the choice of clicking a button you were more familiar with. If you look at a real newspaper compared to online it’s really interesting to see what makes the front cover, you get the editor’s choice aggregating everything and it’s a way better reading experience, the order of the stories has huge significance in itself and you’re forced to take notice of things that don’t immediately grab you.
Will this side of the transition cause a decline in the quality of photography?
It must be a given then that it would be hard to get into skateboarding photography at the moment.
It’s a bit too early to say, but I think that people are way more visually refined than ten years ago, so the quality should go up because people know what’s possible with Photoshop, what HD is, what filters are, it should go back to being about content. With all this stuff it’s so new too, that anyone who says they know where things are going is full of it. I remember the first time I saw a sequence from a digital camera and thinking that that’s all I would see from that point on, just pages and pages of sequences. Transworld even put out a whole issue that was just sequences instead of a photo issue, which was a terrible decision even at the time, but things have worked out completely the opposite; a trick needs to be so crazy to get run as a sequence over a still these days, stills rule the roost. I have heard that generally speaking these days, niche magazines do a lot better than titles that try to cover huge subjects. Now that Rolling Stone has a way smaller page count it’s really hard for them to properly cover all the different genres of music, they can’t do it effectively, whereas magazines that only cover a smaller scene, like nothing but southern hip-hop for example, can do it in more detail and it works better for everyone. Also people are generally loyal to certain crafts, with skateboarding being one. The fact that Graham does this magazine is a huge testament to that and to do it all in film is remarkable. You don’t get that with things like football.
Oh man, I feel so bad for the guys coming up at the moment. If I was on the same trajectory now as I was when I was starting out, it would be really tough. The page counts are so much lower so statistically it’s harder to get photos run and I’d definitely never get a visa through a publishing company to work in America. At the same time, as difficult as it is on that end, there are so many more mediums for people to see your pictures so you can come up way faster. It took me years to start getting things out there and printed, these days you can literally be internet famous overnight. It’s that balance thing; what’s good about something can be bad and vice-versa. It’s the same with the skaters. I remember someone emailing me about PJ Ladd’s part to say that I had to get my hands on the Wonderful Horrible VHS and it took ages to track down, these days they could have just emailed me a link and I would’ve had it on the screen in seconds.
Marius Syvanen - Switch Ollie
Your relationship with Wig Worland is worth getting into especially because you’ve mentioned to me before that photography advice isn’t often given away too freely. Of course he did though. How did that whole process start up? Was the first encounter on that Dope tour? I was already a huge fan, Wig shot so many instantly classic photos right when I was starting to pay a lot more attention to photos. Pictures like Matt Pritchard’s ollie over the white rail in Cardiff, which was a RAD cover, Danny Wainwright’s backside ollie in Bedminster, another RAD cover, they made skateboarding in the UK look amazing. I feel like a lot of national scenes have really good skateboarding in them but none of them were documented to the high level that Wig did.
I think internationally for me at that point, he was the best that there was. In terms of why I chose photography over video, he would be a really key person. I remember he had this photo of Luke McKirdy’s ollie over a water gap shot through bars. It was a super dark horrible day but he still made it look so cool. It was so tangible because it wasn’t some blue-tile pool in California, it was a grim English location but it looked so fresh. To be honest for the first little while I was around him I was just in awe of him, I just wanted to help him do whatever he wanted to do. On that trip he shot a cover of Ali Cairns at Radlands against a red back wall; it was kind of a silhouette picture and he had it set up and shot so fast, that really made an impression on me. He probably shot hundreds and hundreds of photos in that skatepark and he made them all look so amazing. I remember the first time I went to Radlands I was a bit let down to be honest, it didn’t feel anywhere near as magic as he’d made it look. He knew so much information, he trained with an architectural photographer, so he’s really on point technically but he was also really into making it easy for the skater to be photographed as well, everything was about setting up fast and having the flashes out of the way of the skater. He would be the absolute photographic antithesis of a Brain Farm session but with the same level of technical merit. He was just a really good to be around and strangely very open with information. I don’t know if I’d be as open as him necessarily! Haha!
It’s funny, one of the things that had a huge impact on skateboarding photography was when Atiba [Jefferson] started assisting Andrew Bernstein, the guy who shoots the LA Lakers. They have the most insane strobe setups in the roofs of the stadiums. They have say five photographers just follow-focusing the game from all different angles and one guy with a master transmitter that chooses to trigger all the other cameras. They have these huge power packs in the ceiling that are hundreds of times more powerful than what we use for skateboarding so a lot of the photographers are shooting Hasselblad with transparency film because they have so much more control over the light. I went to a Clippers game and I could see the photographers panning everywhere and then the one guy that transmits the trigger signal from a Pocket Wizard and all the cameras are synced up through these different channels to the stadium lighting, it was crazy. Anyway, Andrew Bernstein has been shooting medium format fisheye with fast duration flashes for years and years and he blessed Atiba with the knowledge of how it all worked and skate photography was forever changed. A lot of the stuff that you see in skateboarding photography now actually comes from basketball, whether people are willing to acknowledge it or not.
Good that he did.
Yeah, that’s the photography disease, it’s just like skateboarding; you’re on holiday and everyone is looking at the historical architecture and marvelling at all the events that took place there and all you can think about is checking to see if the Hubba has enough run up to skate!
I have to say that it’s different with the internet, it’s definitely easier to get access to the right information but back then there wasn’t as much literature about shooting photography with artificial light. With most of the sports in UK, the photographers can’t set up flashes so the culture around sports photography in the UK was based around shooting the fastest film with the smallest grain.
What’s funny is you looking at the cameras and not watching the basketball.
Neen Williams - FS Nollie 180
Brad Cromer - Kickflip Footplant Finger Flip
You’ve said before for you nothing compared to shooting photos and the ongoing energy around the time of Waiting for the World. You seem to have an appreciation for your roots when it comes to your career, which is great when you consider where you are now and who you’re shooting with. Is that statement still true for you? Definitely, for whatever I’ve achieved since then, that will always be my favourite time in skateboarding and photography, it was all just really exciting and fresh back then. I remember Wig asked me to go and shoot a photo of Nick Jensen for a London article in Sidewalk. I’d seen him skate South Bank before but never really talked to him, but we clicked right away and after that first day we skated together the whole time. He was really young at the time, but he was such a cool kid from day one, really nice and down to earth he just wanted to skate 24-7. Through Nick I met Dan Magee who was already really into pushing how far he could take the production quality of skateboard videos. He was quick on generators, lights, cameras and lenses as well as all the editing and design aspect of making videos. That’s a huge gamut of subjects to cover but he was one of the most passionate filmers there ever was so he made it all seem easy. Dan was, and still is, really inspiring to be around, as well as Wig helping me out with specific photography things. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am without Dan. It was really good timing with Blueprint at that time; everyone was really tight in terms of being friends but they all really pushed each other too. A lot of the time when people are put into these team situations, more than often people are thrown together for being good at a certain type of skateboarding and that’s where the correlation ends, but everyone involved with Blueprint at that time would have skated together whether they were sponsored or not. It was exciting to have the chance to connect to those early Wig photos at that time in England as opposed to what it’s like in California, I’ve always been more of an E100VS-on-a-grey-day than Velvia-with-ablue-sky kind of guy.
I’m a really big fan of British skateboarding, I love the way it looks, the way that people approach it and the scene around it. British people really understand skateboarding on a more fundamental level than perhaps in a lot of other countries, it’s a really different vibe and it’s really easy to become totally immersed in it. I was talking to [Mike] Manzoori last night actually, and he said when he goes back to London he does these ridiculously long skates from say, Holborn to Stretham, just to cruise through the city and soak it up, it’s the best sightseeing bus in town! There was a lot of that during the Blueprint period, up all hours of the day and night, skating from one end of the city to the other, just enjoying the sensation of skating through a city that you loved. It wasn’t just London, there was also a good spread across the country. We’d go up to Aberdeen to skate with John [Rattray] or Edinburgh to skate with Colin [Kennedy], down to Sheffield to skate with Bainsy, we went all over the place. It was the beginning of a whole new wave of British skaters that you could see could definitely compete on an international scale. 411VM had rejected that Build and Destroy promo, they kept coming up with excuses, “It’s too short”, “It’s too long”, “The tricks aren’t good enough”… I think honestly they were just in their little Costa Mesa bubble and didn’t care to take the risk with a company that didn’t pay to advertise. I think in the end Dan got disappointed and just put the promo out in the Sumo video but there was that cliché I love of turning a bad situation into a good one too and Dan decided to make a full length video and put it out himself. I remember the soundcheck for the premiere of Waiting For The World in Sheffield, Dan put Rattray’s part on, I was so proud to be part of it and I knew that people everywhere were going to take notice of how good the video was. Everyone has their own little favourite timeframe in skateboarding and that period was the pinnacle for me.
Zered Bassett - FS Crook Pop Over
You’re still keeping a close eye on this side of the water too?
Whose work is inspiring yours right now?
Oh yeah. I keep up on all the magazines and try to keep in touch with all the OG Blueprint team as much as possible. Andy [Horsley] and Ben [Powell] as much as I can too. I try to check all the videos but to be honest my favourite thing is the Instagram feeds that dig up all the old photos, pictures of Curtis McCann skating Meanwhile or Manzoori at Ewer Street are worth being on Instagram alone.
I’ve always loved Sam Ashley’s photos. Besides Wig, he’s pretty much the best photographer there is for me. I love Mike O’Meally’s photos too, but yeah, Sam Ashley’s photos for sure are pictures that I like to look at a lot. He shoots all over the place, one day he’ll have a photo in the Isle of Man, the next in Dubai and he shoots with all kinds of different skaters. His style is quite subtle, he’s not trying to draw your attention to how clever he is with crazy Photoshop effects and stuff like that, his photos are just really well shot and stand the test of time. Photography is a bit like preparing food; some people put in all sorts of spices and dressing and decorate the dish like a Christmas tree so that you feel like you’re definitely getting something special irrespective of what it actually tastes like, but Sam’s photos are just really simple and well done. It would be really difficult to emulate anything that he does because he’s just got a really good talent for having the right angle of the right guy at the right time.
How is skating here received in the US? Are brands like Isle and Palace liked as much as we think? At the moment that particular style of skating, like Bronze 56K definitely has its niche market at this point, there is definitely a presence. There are Palace fans, Isle fans and fans of all different brands everywhere and it’s easier than ever to get your hands on anything so it’s interesting to see where everything will go. There are the big corporate brands doing their thing but there are also the smaller brands that are successful because people are loyal to that small-brand feel and it’s really easy to get hold of. While the competitive aspect to skateboarding is really promoted and pushed at the moment by those bigger brands, I think there’s a knee-jerk reaction to join the other direction as well because it’s harder to relate to the Street League stuff. Well I can’t. It’s impressive to watch the dangerous and consistent stuff, but there’s something that transcends that ability thing, where it’s definitely more about style, where you’re skating, what your approach is and what music you’re skating to. It’s definitely more of a performance art than a sport for me. Competitive skateboarding, as much as I respect it, lacks a bit of charm for me.
Ryan Sheckler - Halfcab Bluntslide
How do you keep things interesting for yourself or progress your own work? That’s one thing that is frustrating with skate photography at the minute as the filming gets more complex. Some of the rigs and setups people are filming with, you’re definitely secondary fiddle to these cranes and helicopters, it’s a technique in itself just to get to shoot a photo without shooting all of the other stuff going on around it. I think in the past to push yourself as a photographer you’d try new equipment, angles or film, it’s a bit of a different beast now, maybe it’s more about distribution than execution. I still think that a classic Hasselblad photo is my favourite so it’s hard for me to let that go.
How do you keep things interesting for yourself or progress your own work? That’s one thing that is frustrating with skate photography at the minute as the filming gets more complex. Some of the rigs and setups people are filming with, you’re definitely secondary fiddle to these cranes and helicopters, it’s a technique in itself just to get to shoot a photo without shooting all of the other stuff going on around it. I think in the past to push yourself as a photographer you’d try new equipment, angles or film, it’s a bit of a different beast now, maybe it’s more about distribution than execution. I still think that a classic Hasselblad photo is my favourite so it’s hard for me to let that go. If you watch BBC’s Planet Earth, the way those filmmakers work they just want to depict the wildlife in the most beautiful way possible where you’re not thinking it’s a crazy angle or crazy colours, you’re just 100% there with the snow leopard watching it hunt a mountain goat. That’s what I really like and that’s why I really like Sam Ashley’s photos, you’re just looking at a beautiful image. That’s a really difficult skill to have, to do clean really well. I guess I’m always focused on trying out ways to try and get cleaner.
Bobby Worrest - FS Boardslide
I know you’ve been blessed to own [Mike] Blabac’s camera and Ryan Gee’s fisheye. Let’s finish up on hearing whether you feel like you’ve made worthy use of their equipment at this point. I was looking at them last night, they still look so cool and contemporary and the 203fe body was released in 1994, the design is timelessly classic. A film camera demands that you concentrate when you’re using it and I love that, you can’t rely as much on overhauling a poorly captured image in Photoshop because what you see on the transparency is what you get, it’s a very unforgiving medium. I’ve tried my best in my own way to carry on those two guys’ legacy, but they’re both such legendary photographers that to be honest I’m just happy to have their old equipment and get invited to the party. A lot of the older equipment is actually better quality than the newer stuff, especially the lenses. Anyone who knows anything about glass will tell you that comparing the 30mm Zeiss Distagon fish eye you use with the Hasselblad to the Nikon or Canon fisheye equivalents is like chalk and cheese, the Canon and Nikon lenses have a kaleidoscope of fringing defects, whereas the Zeiss is clean as a whistle.
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