That skaters view the world through a unique and uniquely revelatory lens is no secret. Where civilians see safety—a handrail, a wheelchair ramp—skaters see opportunity. What others view as unsightly—drainage ditches, condemned motels and their stagnant pools of brown scum-skimmed water—skaters seek out.
We will drive for hours just hoping the spot hasn’t been dozed; we’ll bring brooms and buckets, torches and tents, and bags of concrete. What everyone else takes for granted—empty parking lots, the transitioned planter outside a bank, a freshly painted curb, a Dumpster beside a loading dock—skaters notice immediately.
Where the rest of the world sees limits and nastiness and the bland burden of suburban life, we see possibility; we see an invitation to construct something out of air and movement, a structure at once ephemeral and everlasting.
And it’s fairly common knowledge how the rest of the world views us. We are misfits, malcontents, punks. We are anarchists. We are drunk and uneducated and out of work. We lack skills. And ambition. And discipline. We are antisocial and insolent and we should’ve already outgrown this silly childish hobby.
This distraction. This waste of time. We should get a real job that will allow us to enjoy grown-up hobbies. Like golf. Or shopping, or hunting, or collecting model trains and setting up elaborate miniature railroad tracks in our finished basements. We dress funny. We wear our hats the wrong way. Our jeans are too tight. Or too baggy. We sell drugs. We only listen to death metal.
We are lonely, hateful, violent. We are going nowhere or at least nowhere good, and we are going there fast. We will amount to nothing, make no valuable contribution to society. We are criminals. Marginalized. Disaffected. Angry. We are, in every sense of the word, misunderstood.
Which is why Jenny Sampson’s tintype photography is so stirring, so original, so necessary. With very few exceptions, the world has only seen skaters on their boards. A skater trying a trick. A skater being chased from a spot. A skater pushing or bombing a hill or falling again and again and again.
We are in constant motion, and our patent aversion to stasis is one of the reasons why video has all but supplanted magazines and their quaint old-school photography. But even in photos, there is an implicit trajectory of movement.
Skateboarding culture is an exceptionally well-documented, and yet, the catalog of images is almost completely without portraiture, without still lifes to study and reflect upon—until now. In ghostly tones and stark, haunting relief, Sampson has pulled off the trick of tricks
She has persuaded random skaters to sit still while she photographs them with a staggeringly slow camera, and in doing so, she has captured, against all odds and with chilling nuance, the restless soul of skateboarding.
