above: My in–laws belong to a country club and wanted all the grandkids to come up for an Easter brunch thing. I was walking to the restroom when I took a short cut through a side room and found the Easter Bunny on break, all by himself. He just stared at me, not a word. I took this photo and kept walking. Probably the happiest I’ve been to have just happened to have a camera with me.
So Craig Stecyk is writing an intro to the book. How did you first meet Craig and how did he get involved with the intro?
Craig Stecyk did the intro for me, and it’s typical Stecyk—dense and obtuse and beautiful. I was honored to have him say yes to doing it. I got to know him through a project I did for Juxtapoz Magazine and we clicked pretty well. His vision of and words about skateboarding were really influential on me even though I had no idea who he was until I was grown up—those early Dogtown articles, everything he did with Powell Peralta, all his silent contributions to all these cool companies and magazines. He’s the definition of a skateboard dark man, but is just such an interesting person, both historically and contemporaneously. Thanks, Craig.
What’s the toughest part of deciding what to omit or what to include during the editing process of putting a book of photos together? Do you feel any kind of pressure to include a certain amount of skateboarding photos alongside your other work?
On the subject of pressure to include skate photos—no, none at all, simply because I did it just how I wanted it done before anybody else was involved. There’s really only one actual action photo, and it’s almost more artsy than it is skatey. I made the choice to not include any action photos because I wanted this to be able to exist outside of normal skate boundaries, to be about the photos and the people instead of the tricks. The tough part of the editing came during the revision version of the book—the one that’s being released—needing to drop some people who are friends to make room was hard. The most time-consuming part was matching the photos together—the ones that run opposite each other had to have some kind of relationship between them, visually or thematically. I really wanted that to be right.
SLAP has been on the forefront of the digital age with things like online content and reader participation with OIAM (the One in a Million program). Has that transformation made your job harder or easier since the magazine went digital? Do you feel closer to the readership now that it’s exclusively online?
I definitely feel closer to the readers with how interactive it is, that’s been one of the biggest pluses of the change. I like having an immediate reaction from and a growing relationship with the people on the message boards. They speak their minds and I like getting the honest feedback. As far as harder or easier, I guess a bit of both. Every day is like deadline now—with a daily website there’s never a lull in needing to get things finished, but there’s more room to maneuver with how we do stories now, which makes things easier. Being able to think about projects in terms of audio, video, photos and written words is so much more liberating than what you could do in print media. I do miss some of the old things, like I used to write a lot more substantial articles, and now it’s smaller pieces all the time, and I do miss seeing a photo as a nice big spread in print. But I do think digital media is the better way to spread information and tell stories.
Speaking of online information, are you doing any kind of promotions for your upcoming book release? Is there a website people can go to get updates and information about it?
I’m doing book release photo shows in Tokyo and San Francisco in October, and we’ll have a big article at slapmagazine.com around the release as well. SLAP readers will also get a code in the article to order the book with 20 per cent discount, which is cool of Gingko to do. So check that out after the middle of October. Also I have a website that’s just been put together—I’ve been focused on what I do at SLAP for so long that I haven’t really built up my own independent presence on the web, but I’m excited that there’s a lot of interest in my book and work right now. I feel like I have some good momentum with all this and it’s what I really would dream of doing all the time, so I’m trying to make all these things come together and see what happens from here…
