When I was a kid in the 80’s, all of my friends had skateboards. I had a skateboard too, but it was an oversized plastic skateboard, heavy and unfit for tricks, so I never made it far as a skateboarder. The idea of using a skateboard as an interface with the landscape remained intriguing, however.
In the early 2000’s, I had become interested in design, and was fascinated with the wide assortment of magazines that were available. One of the types that drew my attention was skateboarding magazines—it was the photography, in particular. They were often photographed by skateboarders themselves, which led to a different kind of photography. The photographers looked at their environment in relation to how they might use it as a skateboarder, photographing walls, railings, benches, etc. It was a very tactile way to look at the environment, and one could use the images to imagine interacting with the landscapes.
Coming from a background where I had focused primarily on drawing, I used photographs to draw. When I would look at photographs, I could feel what it would be like to draw those images, the fine textures and details, the tonal values. I had a tactile connection when I looked at photographs, and the skateboarding photographs had felt like they were intended for a similar kind of experience. I didn’t make photographs back then, but those magazines piqued an interest in photography and how photography could be used. Those images were still in my mind and became influential when I picked up a camera years later.
These are things I still project onto work I look at, and they continue to inform how I look through a camera and the work I make. There is still the sense of how it would feel to draw something and how it would feel to inhabit or interact with the space, even if the space is not presented in a way that I could normally inhabit or interact with (the interaction is after all just as virtual as the space in the image and the image itself). I enjoy work that stimulates my imagination in a tactile way.
This was not something I was specifically thinking about when I made this work, but it is a line of thought that permeates my process and is visible in this series.