AMELIA BRÓDKAHELLO, SKATER GIRLKICKSTARTERLIZZIE ARMANTONORA VASCONCELLOSSOUTHERN CALIFORNIAPHOTOBOOKPHOTOGRAPHYSKATEBOARDINGVISUAL ETHNOGRAPHYWOMEN’S SKATEBOARDING
So, Hello, Skater Girl began around 2011, when I was asked to photograph a women’s skateboarding competition at Vans famous Combi Bowl in Orange, California. It was a privilege to be asked to shoot at this famous location — Vans was exceptionally restrictive about photography there, even after they asked me to shoot there.
I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical about the event. After a year of shooting men almost exclusively, I had trouble picturing in my photographer’s inner eyeball what this was going to be.
I left the event after a few hours dragging my pelican case — and my jaw — along the parking lot asphalt. I was absolutely moved and shaken by the level of heat the women brought to that event. I had goosebumps, literally. For the long slow 405 freeway drive back to Venice Beach, I contemplated how the skating world could be overlooking this vibrant scene. (Van’s commitments to hosting a competition notwithstanding — that was driven largely by Kristy Van Doren-Batson, a daughter of the Vans family.)
Now, here I was. I saw this remarkable opportunity to focus on a document that would capture this overlooked world. I had entered a women’s skateboarding scene that mainstream skate media largely left out of frame. Over the following year, I spent time with the skaters at competitions, in pools, at parks, and in the ordinary intervals around skating.
The book published in 2012 and supported by a Kickstarter campaign, is the first photobook devoted exclusively to women’s skateboarding.
The work is a photographic ethnography made through repeated presence. I came into the scene as a photographer and observer, then earned a place from which the camera could record skill, friendship, encouragement, style, risk, and the daily texture of skating. The photographs are a record of individual people and of a culture that had been there all along.
The project made visible a part of skateboarding that the culture’s male-centered media often set aside. It also carries a recurring approach in my work more generally, which is this: look where attention has narrowed to occlude something at the periphery, spend time immersing and engaging with what that thing that is being overlooked, and give that world a form in which it can be encountered. Some omissions are as familiar as failing to see wheels on luggage; others involve the people whose work and presence have been left outside a field of view.
Several skaters photographed for the book later became prominent figures in skateboarding. Lizzie Armanto competed for Finland in skateboarding’s debut at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and rides for Birdhouse. Amelia Bródka competed for Poland at Tokyo 2020 and founded Exposure, which supports women and girls in skateboarding.
This is one of the projects I’ve done over my career that I am most proud of. Hello, Skater Girl brings photography, cultural research, and independent publishing together as one means of representation: a book made from attention, participation, and an insistence that this community deserved to be seen on its own terms.
Preface
There’s a simple rule for finding a new view to an old landscape. Look at it for a long time. Look at it the way others have looked at it and then learn to look at it the way they do. Believe in it the way the old lookers believe in it. Invest everything to see things the way they’ve been seen. Ask questions. Mimic. Imitate. Listen. Learn. Copy. Emulate. And all the while, know that you’re looking for a new way to see something that is old, that has been taken for granted.
You’ll have to look at it for a really long time.
Then stop. Step back. Look sideways. Look from the corners. Look back on the lookers who are the one’s who protect and insist on the canonical point of view. You yourself — look from a different window, with a different frame, with different assumptions, with naive beliefs. Confront the canon. Stop believing what the original lookers believe, if only for a minute.
Then look again. Fresh eyes. Disbelieving eyes. Assume everything is new.
You’ll see differently. You’ll see things differently. You’ll see different things. You will become different. You’ll wonder — is this the right way? Is this good? Right? Will I get in trouble?
And, as soon as you ask yourself — is this right? Am I okay? Will this get me in trouble? Now, you’re seeing the old thing in a new way. When there’s nothing to validate your instinct except your instinct. You’re seeing the old thing in a new way, maybe for the first time ever.
I shot skateboarding for a year, not knowing what the fuck I was doing at all. I had no sense of what it was to shoot skateboarders, let alone shoot action photography. My photos from the early parts of that year are very near to embarrassing in retrospect. I wanted to learn, so I questioned everything I was doing.
I looked all around the world of skateboard photography. I had subscriptions to all the magazines. I bought all the skateboarding photography books, from the canonical to the out of print, to the truly obscure. I went everywhere online trying to see what skateboarding photography looked like, what it captured, whose stories it told. I traveled a lot. It looks different from other parts of the world.
I asked questions. I listened. I assigned myself informal mentors, letting myself be schooled how to shoot by skaters and photographers and photographers who were skaters.
That year of learning was spectacular. I found something in shooting skate. A new kind of photography, something I had never tried before. I felt it was something I could sink my teeth into. It was something I could learn from scratch. Something about which I could be willfully naive. I could stare blankly and shrug when someone asked, “Hey..what trick was that?” I became friends with lots of people.
After a year of this, I felt visual fatigue. I saw the same photo. Or, rather — I saw the same seven photographs. Over. And over. And over. It’s easy to get visually worn down by lanky dudes coming off loading docks, crail tap, lein tail, rail slide, stand-up back side smith grind, 5-0, indy air, comb your hair, front feeble, smith stall, over crook, over crook revert, lein air, crail tap, air walk, air walk to fakie, backside air, security dude chases, more urban furniture, pop-a-flash, startled stander-by, stand-up five-oh’ng mucky pools, triumphantly bloodied palms, peach-sized swellbow.
But, I’m a photographer and no where near being a skater. I look at the visual moments differently. I wanted to see something different. I wanted to make something different, partly to show that there was something different that no one seemed to see. I wanted to do this to show something I had never seen before. There was something I wasn’t yet seeing. That meant looking different, being different, seeing things that I hadn’t seen. From the outsider’s point of view, I could do something and just shrug when people wondered why I was even bothering with something that no one else seemed to care about.
I only started shooting skate because there was a park nearby and it was a place to go. Soon, it was a place to meet friends, to learn about the place I live and its history. I live in Venice Beach, California. Right there, in the heart of the history of skateboarding.
Staying in one place, shooting for a year or more, something’s bound to give. I found myself shooting at contests. I found myself getting MILSPEC Pelican hard cases and sitting on airplanes on tarmacs waiting to go spend a hot day crouched on concrete chasing photos at skate competitions.
Then, after that year, I had to ask myself — do I do it for another year? Fill the hard drive even more? Was there something new? Something that felt like I was framing a new view?
That’s when I happened upon the spark of an idea that led to “Hello, Skater Girl.”
There were two things I wanted to do. The first was to learn to shoot a subject longitudinally — over a relatively long stretch of time so I could get to know the subject, find its visual personality and reveal it with photographs. The second was to photograph nothing but girl skaters.
It really started when I broke Amelia’s wrist.
— Julian Bleecker
Read the photo book
Read about the original book campaign