The first time I photographed skateboarding was in the year 2000 with a disposable camera that came equipped with a surprisingly effective zoom lens. I was hanging out with a guy who skated and tagged along with him and his friends to Dirty Curb and a random southside parking lot, catching shots of the boys airborne over a gap in the garage or grinding the yellow paint off a parking block. Over the next twenty years, I went in and out of photography, upgrading to a Minolta SLR that I lost in a bar when I was 22 and burning through a couple of digital point-n-shoots that met their deaths after being dropped one too many times. I took a lot of self-portraits and ran an outfit blog circa 2011, and toyed around with street photography, always documenting my life. Photography became a more concentrated medium for me in 2018, and it didn’t take long to find myself back in a skate park, remembering that joy of catching a skater in flight.
I wrote a little bit about my relationship with skate photography for Ilford Photo’s Community page in November, which you can read here, but the gist is I love the shapes the skaters’ bodies make mid-trick, how they resemble birds taking flight or dancers caught in the middle of a move. I love closeup shots that fill the frame, photos that focus not on the trick or its success, but the joy of the movement. Followers of my Instagram have probably seen me talk about this before, but so much of skate photography is about capturing a successful trick, and I like to encourage people to look at the beauty of of the movement regardless of its outcome.
These photos were taken recently at a DIY in Richmond, tagging along with another band of skaters who graciously let me into their spaces. In 2022 I shot less skate than typical of the last few years, and I’m really excited to jump back in. I shoot a lot of film—it’s always exciting to see the developed images, especially since I normally hold off until I have several rolls to send out to the lab and it can be weeks or longer between when I shot a roll of film and when I see the actual photos. Skate photos are always the ones I’m most excited to see, and never tire of down the road.
All photos in this post shot on Rollei Retro 400S (the film) and a Minolta X-700 (the camera). Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.