Ed Templeton and the intimate portrait of the skateboarding subculture

Ed Templeton is a Californian photographer, painter, graphic designer, born in 1972 in Garden Grove, south of Los Angeles. He is also an icon of skateboardworld champion just nineteen and entered in the Hall of Fame of the discipline in 2016. He made his profession of the four-wheeled board from 1990 to 2012. In the meantime, with a Leica M6, documented the life of his crew, the Toy Machine, during promotional tours around the United States. Templeton has behind him over twenty books and exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, and at the Man in Nuoro. Now Aperture, one of the most prestigious photography publishers, has decided to collect his work around the world of skateboarders in a volume entitled “Wire Crossed”.

The book opens with a portrait of a boy with his back against a brick wall. Next to him he has his table, decorated with a small stencil of a AK-73. A cap on his head, jeans, and a shirt that says: “Be reasonable, demand the impossible”. The title page, handwritten by the author, reads: “A seventeen-year non-linear photographic investigation, straddling the intermediate space between the subjective and the objective, on the subculture of sketeboarding and its endemic customs and rituals”. They follow further 260 dense pages of color photographs, black and white, polaroids, drawings, maps, notes, handwritten captions, interviews with the protagonists of those years. The images of the acrobatics alternate with those of moments of rest: cigarettes, beers, kisses, bathing in rivers, trips in the van, hamburgers, joints, showers. But also the incidents of scuffles with the police. And so many bruises, stitches, broken noses. Templeton shows us the slab of his broken neck and the one with the nails to hold the tibia and fibula together, which sentenced the end of his career as a professional skater. The book is crossed byenergy of youth. The bodies, the looks. The thrill of standing on the ridge between freedom and escape. In a dialogue between Templeton And Elissa Steamer, the first girl in history to become a professional skater, he says: “Almost all the skaters I was friends with in high school came from a broken family. I think many of the people attracted to this discipline in the mid-1980s were underprivileged kids who didn’t fit in anywhere else.”

“Wire Crossed” is part of a precise tradition of American photography that starts from “Teenage Lust” by Larry Clark, 1968, passes through “The ballad of sexual dependency” by Nan Goldin, 1986: visual diaries that intertwine intimacy, transgression and yearning. They are works of documentation of community life confined to young people, usually marginal, usually very uninhibited, whose energy is consumed by time. The strong autobiographic diary component, and it is also the case of Templeton’s book, is a double-edged sword. The direct taking, the point of view inside the group, allows to reach deep degrees of spontaneity. However, the result is strongly linked to the place and historical period and the documentary aspect risks prevailing over the poetic one. Templeton seems to be aware of this, emphasizing, of this work, especially the testimony contribution.

The photographer will present the book at Micamera in Milan today.