EDDIE MIGHTY MORENOEMPTY BACKYARD POOLSLOS ANGELES COUNTYSOUTHERN CALIFORNIAFIELD GUIDEHOUSING CRISISPHOTOGRAPHYSKATEBOARDING
Empty Backyard Pools is a photographic ethnography of one Southern California skateboarding culture. During 2011–2013, Julian Bleecker worked with skater Eddie “Mighty” Moreno and a small crew around empty backyard pools: private remnants of a housing crisis, desirable terrain for skating, and places reached through local knowledge. The photographs attend to pools, skaters, routes, fences, tools, and the particular work of getting there, while withholding individual addresses and locations.
The book adopts the visual language of a National Park Service field guide: a familiar format placed around a culture and landscape that an official guide would never ordinarily catalogue. That speculative container shifts how the pools and the people who skate them can be encountered. A field guide usually offers names, classifications, and routes through a protected landscape. Here it gives a reader a way to look at a dispersed, private, and sometimes guarded world with care, while keeping its precise locations out of view.
Satellite imagery and smartphone maps were essential field tools in the search for pools. They sit beside the camera and skateboard as part of the research apparatus, appearing in the project through aerial views that orient the reader without disclosing an address. Photography becomes a way of entering and representing a culture; the book gives that work a carefully made public form.
Empty Backyard Pools belongs to a broader practice that moves among engineering, technical systems, futures and forecasting, photography, and social and historical research. Bleecker’s humanities PhD informs an attention to the historical conditions inside present-day questions. In this book, that range is carried by a camera, a field-guide form, aerial imagery, maps, publishing, and time with a crew.
The first printing appeared in July 2016. This second printing, published in June 2021, gathers the photographic record as a guide to a particular landscape, a small crew, and the tools used to find a way into it.