In more than 20 years photographing on the streets of Los Angeles, I’ve never once set out to take photos of skateboarders. And yet, I have more photographs of skateboarders in my street portfolio than of any other single subject.
Now both a modest form of transportation and a Southern California subculture, skateboarding surfaced in the 1950s when ocean surfers put metal wheels on wooden planks as a way to “sidewalk surf” when waves were flat. Surfboard manufacturers were soon putting out skateboards, too, and it didn’t hurt that these could be sold to kids with scarce access to a beach and with no real plans to become actual surfers. An onshore lifestyle with a surfing vibe was now available to anyone.
My own experience on a skateboard (many miles inland from “Surf Cities” Malibu and Huntington Beach) dates back to the 1960s when clay wheels were the thing and when hitting a sidewalk pebble would cause a wheel to simply stop. (After being thus launched from my skateboard enough times, I took up surfing’s and skateboarding’s “rival” sport, skiing. Much softer landings.) Those clay wheels hindered skateboarding’s wider adoption until the advent of the much more forgiving polyurethane wheels in the early 1970s. That same decade, a prolonged California drought contributed to skaters using empty backyard swimming pools to take freestyle skateboarding to another level.
The 1980s are considered to be skateboarding’s golden age as a mainstream activity. By the 1990s, skateboarding culture began to turn inward and more urban. Online accounts of those who skated in that era distinguish the “vertical” emphasis of the 1980s from the “street” stunts of the 1990s, such as sliding along handrails, steps, and curbs. Whether one was into vertical or street in those years, a skateboarding superstar emerged: Tony Hawk. A red letter day in skateboarding was Hawk’s first documented “900” skate feat at the 1999 X Games in San Francisco. With skateboarding introduced as an Olympic sport at the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, the thrills provided by skateboarders could be appreciated by a massive audience.
Even today, it is not unusual in Los Angeles to see small crews of teens capturing video content of their friends performing board stunts in unauthorized spaces – and ready to scatter if an authority figure approaches.
Absent from my portfolio are examples of skateboard athletes performing their acrobatics in the many public skate parks scattered throughout the Southland. I largely choose to avoid “performances” in my street photography and with so many examples of soaring, board-based maneuvers already expertly documented by others, I haven’t seen a need to pile on.
Instead, the fashion sense and the urban ease of skateboarders have repeatedly caught my attention when I’m simply out on the streets looking for interesting subjects. These encounters are happy occurrences that I hope will continue.
[Featured image/bonus photo: Melrose Avenue 2021.]
More Los Angeles street photos at gordonownby.net
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