above: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, taken at his home in Berkeley. He played a bunch of new music for us, showed us around his house, and he and Nate played video games for a long time while I snapped away. It was basically just hanging out with one of the best rhymers ever. For some reason I also remember deciding on the way back home that I was going to propose to my girlfriend/now–wife.
I know this is going to be a impossible one and put you on the spot, but who are the three most photogenic skateboarders of your era?
I feel like my era spans from the mid-80s until right now, so those are some wide options… this is hard because photogenic is a lot different than favorite. Gonz, for sure. I feel like Kenny Reed always looked really good in photos. Julien Stranger. This is impossible.
You are also the captain of the ship over at SLAP… how did you first get involved over there and was their a point where you had to decide between photography and being an editor? Do you find you still have time to do both?
I got here mainly through people I knew from my filming days. Phil Shao and Paul Zuanich were two of my best friends and they recommended me to Lance Dawes and Fausto Vitello when Lance started asking around about somebody who could be an assistant editor and do a little bit of everything. I started here six weeks after finishing college, I was a couple weeks shy of 22. I’m 33 now and have been here 11 years. Being the editor has always been my main role here and I guess writing and interviewing has been my second most regular role, with photography coming in third. I never felt like I had to choose one thing over another like that—I knew what had to get done and sometimes it was office stuff and sometimes it was being out shooting, so I would do what I could whenever I could. Photography has always been my primary love in the publishing world and I always want to be doing it more. But I love writing as well, so I never felt I was doing anything I didn’t want to be doing.
I know your photography goes well beyond skateboarding. Is it all just photography to you or do you approach something like a portrait or an inanimate object in a different way as far as composition?
Sure, skate photography, portraiture, street photography, documentary, editorial stuff etcetera all have their own aesthetic and feel and I probably think about them differently in some ways. But really I think I approach them pretty similarly and try to get the same thing out of most of them—a stylized documentary image with some emotion in it. I have a ton of photographic and artistic inspiration from a wide variety of sources, to the degree that I think they all just swirl together into some kind of visual stew that I draw from across the board, rather than approaching each thing differently.
Who was the most influential photographer to you within skateboarding when you were growing up? Were there separate influences from Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding in terms of their photos and photographers at that time?
Probably a combo of Sturt, Dawes and Morford. I thought Sturt’s stuff really stood out in the early 90s and effected my photography in general, and then Dawes’ and Morf’s stuff, fisheye especially, had a lot of impact on what I think a good skate photo looks like. I didn’t pay a ton of attention to the photography in Thrasher. I liked the stuff Grant Brittain was doing for sure but it wasn’t as impactful upon me. I was always a SLAP kid. Best mag ever. Nothing else came close for me. Later Thomas Campbell, Ari Marcopulous and Brian Gaberman were influential too.
