Earlier this year photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark had a photography show of his early 90’s documentation of the skate scene that led to his seminal film Kids. I was actually in NYC at the time for my now fiance’s knee surgery, but I wasn’t able to make it over to the show because I was taking care of her. Not only was there a show, but Leo Fitzpatrick put together a zine with photographs from that time period and interview with Clark and Tobin Yelland. I am a photobook/zine collector, a Larry Clark collector, and Kids had and outsized impact on my life so I needed that zine.
I sent my friend Ronen down to the gallery for me, but they were sold out of the zine. The gallery told Ronen they were getting more in and they would save a copy for me. I called the gallery a few days later and they were holding onto it for me so I sent my buddy Mike over and he grabbed one. Mission accomplished. And then 7 months went by before I actually made it back to NYC, which is crazy in itself, but long story short, Mike finally gave me the zine last night. As I sat reading it while I was waiting for the train, I started thinking about how much of an impact Kids and Larry Clark had on my life and I basically wrote this post in my head before realizing I should actually write it down. Stuff like this is exactly why I created the “B-Sides” section of my website – a place to write down whatever I am thinking about without worrying about it detracting from my photography work.
In 1994 I was a freshman in high school I started a punk zine and eventually a punk record label. In 1995 I had to take an art class in high school and my mom had a camera so I figured maybe photography would be a good skill to have. I started shooting punk bands and really fell in love with it. These day band photography feels so fucking boring to me, but at the time that was all I wanted to do.
That same year, 1995 Kids came out and it blew my fucking mind. I had never seen a movie that felt real. It was so fucking relatable. I wasn’t a skater, but these were my people. I was living in suburban DC and not downtown Manhattan, but the sex, drugs, violence and boredom were all the exact same. There’s a scene in Kids where Telly and Casper roll up to Washington Square Park and daps up all their friends before they beat the living shit out of someone with skateboards. I used to go up to this fountain all my friends would hang out and do the exact same thing. The girl I lost my virginity to I had met right after she got out of juvie for hitting another girl in the face with a skateboard, trucks first. I once got in a brawl with a whole skate crew where I hit a guy with a baseball bat, had a shovel broken over my back and got knocked out with a beer bottle to the face. Kids felt like my life, only they were way fucking cooler. I knew I had to live in NYC one day… it just took me a decade to get there.
Shortly after I fell in love with Kids my mom gave me a copy of Larry Clark’s book Tulsa. My mom is not normally the type of person to give their teenager a deeply NSFW book about drug addicted teens, but she loves documentary photography and she knew I would love it and she was right. I am guessing if she could do it all over again she probably wouldn’t have, but that book changed my life so dramatically and I don’t think I really knew that until I started thinking about it on the train last night.
A lot of people might look at my work and think I was influenced my Nan Goldin, but I didn’t really find her work until I was in my 20s. Tulsa was the book that made me realize I could make art out of my idiot friends. I never even thought about just documenting my life. I was photographing bands, but not the people looking at the bands. I continued to shoot music, but I also finally turned my attention on my friends. Sadly in 2001 I got a digital camera and the digital photos I took from 2001 until 2008 are absolute trash, but you can trace a direct line from my discovery of Tulsa in the late 90s to the subculture, sex and chaos I have spent my life documenting.
Obviously I have others to thank for that too, many of them from the skateboarding world, the CKY2k videos and even Tom Green had a big impact on turning the lens on my friends. I have so much fucked up video on old DV tapes trying to emulate those pre Jackass skate videos. I remember someone comparing some of my photos to Ed Templeton at some point and I only knew him cause my vegan punk friends would buy his vegan leather skate shoes. When I found his photography after seeing Beautiful Losers in 2008 he instantly became one of my favorite photographers. The reason I got into band photography in the first place is because of my love of Glen Friedman who started photographing punk bands for Skateboarder Magazine and really helped bring those worlds together. I owe my whole life to punk rock, but skate culture is a close second even though I can barely skate.
Not too long ago I had a bunch of old negatives scanned (I have more being scanned as we speak) and it gives a little peek into the nascent stages of my photography career. I have shared some of that work, but I put together a little gallery of that early work from my late teenage years that shows the influence of Kids, Tulsa and Larry Clark. I just wish I had kept this up instead of switching to digital too early. I hope you dig this stuff.
