A celebration of skateboard culture from the 1970s to today, featuring interviews with legendary skaters including Tony Hawk and Mark Gonzales, a foreword by director Spike Jonze, and over 400 rare photographs and images Since the 1970s, skateboarding has emerged from the fringes of the Californian underground to become a global phenomenon and a culture of its own. Throughout each passing decade, skateboarding’s creativity, both on and off the board, has influenced mainstream fashion, photography, music, art, and film. In this beautifully designed celebration of skateboarding, Morgan Bouvant and Sébastien Carayol retrace the rich history of skateboard culture through seventeen exclusive interviews with legendary skaters; numerous engaging essays recounting key events, crucial local scenes, and meaningful anecdotes in skate history; nostalgic explorations of brands, movies, and fashion; and over 400 photos by iconic skateboard photographers, carefully curated advertisements by legendary brands, and detailed diagrams showcasing skateboard anatomy and the different types of tricks. Perfect for skaters old and new, <Skateboard Culture< is a stunning ode to more than five decades of free-spirited rebellion.

Autorentext

Morgan Bouvant is a skateboarder and exhibition curator who has been actively involved in the French skate scene since he was introduced to skateboarding at six years old. He has worked for V7 and Etnies for over fifteen years and has organized skateboarding events such as the Teenage Tour, the Marseille Bowlriders, and the Public Domaine exhibition at La Gaîté Lyrique.

Sébastien Carayol is a journalist, filmmaker, exhibition curator, and avid skater who has been skateboarding since 1989. He has written for skateboard magazines such as Skateboarder, The Skateboard Mag, Thrasher, Freestyler, Sugar, and Kingpin. He is also the author of several books, including Agents Provocateurs, Look Away: The Art of Todd Francis, From Dirt to Dust, and The FTC book.

Leseprobe
Origins

“Skateboarding is not a crime.” When the slogan, borrowed from a 1964 article in the New York Times, first appeared on a sticker stuck to the bottom of a skateboard in the 1980s, it was both a manifesto and a plea.

With skaters flooding the streets to practice their art, skateboarding had become much more visible, and not just to potential future skaters. Upstanding citizens, outraged by the skaters’ fearless tricks, didn’t hesitate to call the police to stop what they saw as a disruptive problem.

Today, two decades into the twenty-first century, it can be hard to believe that this dynamic ever existed. Skateboarding is no longer in the comfortable shadows of a counterculture accessible only to the in crowd.

With millions of skaters around the globe, televised contests (including the Olympics), popular video games, thousands of skate parks, certified instructors, and even specialized schools (like Bryggeriets Gymnasium in Sweden, a high school where skateboarding is taught as a formal subject), it’s easy to see that skateboarding has become socially acceptable.

At least to some extent.

Though skaters have begrudgingly allowed the general public a glimpse into their world, the lifestyle still holds a certain mystique, with its own codes, customs, keys, and traditions. Any attempt to understand and explain it all is destined to fail.

First of all, there is the very nature of skateboarding: while it resembles a sport in its emphasis on risk-taking and getting back up to try again, the culture of rebellion that sprang up around skateboarding in the early 1970s is a world away from the traditional trappings of sports, with its coaches, practices, and requirements to perform under standardized conditions.

The act of riding a skateboard is just one small part of a diverse artistic tapestry. Tug that thread, and you’ll quickly begin to unravel a vast web of connected practices. For example, skateboarding is defined in part by the grace of its movement (“style”), which itself is influenced by the graphic arts, avant-garde fashion, and a unique musical culture, all of which proudly come together to create performance art—in the situationist sense—designed for consumption. Ever since the first magazines and VCRs, skateboard culture has chosen to propagate along its own channels, relying on self-produced videos rather than broadcast TV, and it has long been a proponent of the DIY ethos. It is difficult to imagine traditional sports encouraging such an imaginative, freeform approach.

In short, skateboarding has built up a culture of its own from scratch, brick by brick. But how, exactly?

This book attempts to retrace its unlikely odyssey, a tale of glory days and hard times, feast and famine. It was written for everyone—from pros to complete novices—to explain how something that was once a children’s toy became a recognized sport, blazing a trail out of the shadows and into the spotlight without allowing the influence of the masses to water it down completely.

In the early days, however, no one could have imagined it would eventually reach such heights. To find the “Big Bang” that set things in motion, we need to go all the way back to the seventeenth century, when Belgian inventor John Joseph Merlin—who also designed prototypes for wheelchairs, scales, and watches—created the forebears of today’s roller skates. He would put them on and parade around a grand salon while playing the violin, pausing only to admire himself in an immense mirror. This was the first recorded attempt to put a human being on wheels, albeit rudimentary ones.

From this point on, the origin story is peppered with discoveries, experiments, and makeshift contraptions all converging toward something much more exciting. In the 1930s, the Skooter Skate, a sort of half-scooter, half-skateboard, hinted at the irrepressible urge to surf the pavement. On May 14, 1959, American inventor Albert C. Boyden filed the first patent for his Child’s Coaster, which had all the components of a rudimentary skateboard: a deck plus four wheels attached to movable axles held taut by a spring. That same year, coincidentally or otherwise, the Los Angeles Times reported that six college students had been injured on campus while racing down hills on a “skateboard”—the first recorded use of the word. That article was also the first to link skateboarding with vagrancy and included a call to ban the fiendishly dangerous object.

Though skateboards had only just been invented, the verdict was already in—skateboarding was now, indeed, a crime.

But this chilly reception did not stop it from finding its niche. In the early 1960s, Boyden joined forces with John Humphrey to market a proto-board known as the Humco Surfer, and Roller Derby launched the first skateboard to achieve widespread commercial success.

Surfers immediately saw the appeal, riding these rolling boards to relieve their boredom when there were no waves. Larry Stevenson published the first ad for a skateboard in Surf Guide Magazine and created his own brand, Makaha, in 1963.

When skateboarding first made a splash in the 1960s, it set off a little ripple of public infatuation. The swell even washed up on French shores as a very brief trend in 1964, when pro surfer Jim Fitzpatrick brought a dozen boards to hand out on his tour to Paris and Biarritz.

Back in the United States, every good little boy and girl got a Roller Derby for Christmas, and effervescent youth idol Patti McGee was photographed doing a handstand on a skateboard for the cover of LIFE magazine—a gymnastic pose with little resemblance to modern skateboarding tricks.

Already, the toy wa…