Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed

I am a skateboarder. The people documented in this work are skateboarders. By nature, we are self-reliant and tough as nails. Most of us have a wire or two crossed in our brains that lets us continually punish ourselves in pursuit of landing a trick. There's a kinship we share that transcends race, creed, or sexual orientation because we know what it takes and understand the feeling it gives us. This work is a portrait of a people, a culture, and a time. I wanted to do a truthful study of skateboard culture—examining its faults, celebrating its uniqueness, and sharing what it was like to exist in my particular path through life.

I was exposed to Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) and Larry Clark's Tulsa (1971) in the early 1990s. These books were famous well before I was clued in to them but the example laid forth in those books was clear to me. Document your life and the people surrounding you.

I started this project around 1994. I had become a professional skateboarder in 1990 at age 18 and, photographically speaking, felt like I had squandered the first four years. I hadn’t captured the adventures, the characters, the road miles across America, and the trips around the world.

At the end of the Wires Crossed book I wrote: "I picked up a camera to remember my youth as a skateboarder […] Playing the roles of both observer and participant, I wanted to document the extraordinary things I was able to do, and the people I was doing them with. We traveled the world using public and private infrastructure in ways nobody intended on our skateboards in constant conflict with security guards, police, and a litigious society. We felt like outlaws operating outside of the social order, getting away with what we could as we toured across nations searching for skate spots, validation, and cheap thrills. I tried to record what this lifestyle was like on film, shooting the triumphs and disasters, the blood and the boredom, the self-medication, the effects of fame, the lust, and the endless marginal moments in-between […]"

The photographs in this exhibition are loosely organized by subject matter. The overarching theme is boredom, and the attempts to stave it off through thrill-seeking in forms like skateboarding, vandalism, drugs, sex, music, and camaraderie. Spanning roughly from 1995 to 2012, this work was made before cell phones became the ultimate boredom killer. In this way, Wires Crossed serves as a time capsule of a certain era in skate culture, just before the world shrank exponentially through mobile access to the internet.

– Ed Templeton