First, when and how did you start skateboarding?
I started skateboarding when I was a kid. My uncle was a surfer, skateboarder, and a punk rocker guy and he used to send us skateboards when we were young. We didn’t know how to ride them but whenever we’d go visit him in New York he would take us to a skateboard park. This is probably ’70s, around there, I was born in 1968. When I was young I moved here to San Jose. Right when I got out of the moving truck the kids across the street were skateboarding so it was kind of immediate, just grabbed my board and started hanging out with those two guys all throughout high school, skating curbs and going to Winchester park.
Sid Enck, bs smith
When and how did you start shooting photos?
Well we would have to skip 10 years there.
Oh, let’s not skip 10 years.
Oh it’s easy to skip 10 years. That was just high school, I always continued skating, and at the end of high school I started getting more into surfing. My brother and my uncle, the crazy punk rock uncle, moved to Hawaii. When I graduated I just went straight there, everyone else was all, “oh, my S.A.Ts and I’m going to this college,” and I was like “bye” and went to Hawaii for 5 years. It wasn’t until I came back to San Jose that I met some of the people I would end up hanging out with for a long time like Salman Agah, Jason Adams, and Tim Brauch. It was almost immediate when I came home. I think I was in the Safeway by my house and I saw Salman. We had known each other a little bit and he was in a class with my younger brother. He was kind of like, “Hey, what are you doing?” I had just moved back so we went and skated this little half pipe. Salman’s friends were meeting us there which included Jason Adams, Sean Maduley, and Edward Devera. I just ended up hanging out with them, even though I was like 10 years older. Those were the people I was skating with. It went forward from there, skating skating skating. At the same time I was going to junior college and took a few classes, ya know, an art class and a photography class. My grandfather was an avid photographer, his eye sight was going bad so he started getting a camera with auto focus and different things so he gave me his Nikon FE2. I would notice when a photographer would come and Jason would do something or Tim would do something. then all of a sudden you would see it in Transworld, or a thing in Thrasher and I was like, “oh, okay, I see these things all the time.” These guys just skating all the time and most of the time there was never a photographer around. I had a camera and thought maybe I should try. It was really the time when Tobin Yelland came, and him and Jason shot a photo and it’s kind of a famous photo of him, or at least it’s my favorite photo of him. He’s 5050 grinding a rail but it was curved and Tobin was at the bottom, really right underneath him, and it’s right before he touched down. He’s got his Think board where it was him on fire, brand new board, and it was just an awesome photo. You see the full page photo in the mag and you think “I wanna try to do that,” you know?
Israel Forbes, fs pivot on qp made from old decks
How long from that point of being inspired by Tobin to where you were shooting professionally?
Well, I’ve always been a very slow learner, and this isn’t digital photography, this is film photography so there was a lot of a learning curve. I had to get a fisheye, figure out how to use flashes and stuff like that so it must have been maybe two years Tim, and they needed photos for ads. We would go try, then we would try again and again, and finally we would get something that they could use. At the time I was living in a big punk house of 10 guys with small little rooms so it was cheap, I only had to make a certain amount of money to survive. There were always photographers that would come to town and give you little tips, things like that. I even had one guy write me a little cheat sheet, and I used that cheat sheet for a really long time. It felt really good to get that first ad, it felt even better to get one that wasn’t an ad, where you’re just sending it somewhere. Which seemed crazy too. I would just send the negative, like “oh, I’m just gonna send the negative to Grant at Transworld.” They’re just gone. You don’t have a computer with a backup file, you just send em.
Would they call you to tell you it’d be in the magazine or would you just see it?
They never called you, you’d just see it or you’d get a check. I also remember getting a letter from Grant, the first few times, it was a stock letter he would send to photographers with check boxes. What you’re doing wrong, and what you’re doing right. A way of not just saying, “dude, you suck.” He had a nice way of saying you need to not shoot so slow or… you know what I mean.
Jason Adams, tree ride
Who all did you work for? You said you worked for Skateboarder?
I worked for Skateboarder for about two years. I was never really staff for anyone, I always did stuff for Transworld just being here in San Jose. Of course Slap were the people I always tried to send things to first, because I thought Slap was the best skateboard magazine pretty much ever, and Lance Dawes published some photos for me. I never really got in Thrasher too much, I’ve done a few things for them but I never really had a connection with them. At the same time Jason was riding for Vans and I knew the team manager as well, so I got to go on some trips with them. The cool thing about Skateboarder when I was there was that I was allowed to contribute to Big Brother as well, they just wanted to see it and get a first crack at it. They were on the higher echelon of photography and Big Brother was… Big Brother.
Some of your most memorable experiences related to skateboarding?
Always getting to shoot with new people is rad. You’re on a Vans trip and Cardiel, Julien, and Jason Jesse are on it. It’s really like, “whoa, I get to shoot these guys, super rad.” I did a lot of trips with Vans when they were doing the Pro Series. It was Julien, Karma, Alan all these different people and we did a lot of trips, went to Oregon to go skate Burnside, East Coast trips, got to go to Europe. I remember there’s a photo I have of Julien that was a big black and white pool photo of him, which was really awesome. We would go on trips and the team manager would say we need a Julien photo, he didn’t want to take photos with us.
(Door opens)
Jason Adams: “Uh oh, you’re talking, shit.”
Speak of the devil…
Jason: I’ll leave ya be.
Do you still shoot much skateboarding?
No, not really.
Al Partanen, bs air
Did Slap going out have something to do with that?
Yeah, they were always a constant inspiration, somewhere I knew I could get my stuff used. It was a combination of a lot of things. When I worked at Skateboarder, slowly the people I was photographing weren’t what they wanted. I wasn’t a get up and go photographer with the book with all the spots, driving around, I don’t even drive a car. After I stopped working for Skateboarder I was still shooting a lot of ads and things until the downturn of the economy when all the programs were slimmed down. They were already paying so many people to shoot and half the magazine was shot by other people. They started telling people they didn’t need any more submissions. It sucks to hear that when you’re a freelance photographer, and at the same time I was getting older. I was still always skating and shooting with Jason and people in San Jose cause they were in front of me. As for the books, I did the book “With A Camera From Marc” which was all about a little Pentax 35mm camera Marc Johnson gave me. It’s crazy to think because I had this Nikon FE2 and a T4, but I would never pull out the FE2 unless it was time to shoot skate photos. They’re not much different, but the camera Marc gave me had a camera strap. I never liked straps, they were always in the way when I was trying to get what I wanted, I always took it off of my cameras. Once Marc gave me the Pentax I started to wear it. It got me into a different trajectory, a different route, I started to see things a little bit differently and my skate photography started to be more with that camera.
I published that book and was making almost nothing off skateboard photography, working some other random jobs. I was more into shooting portraits and things going on, though I was still getting a lot of work with people like Enjoi, getting to go on trips and I lived with a lot the guys over at the mansion. I was shooting photos of people on the team doing whatever they did, being themselves, and actually getting an ad out of it and getting paid. When Matt Eversole was doing it he was my roommate and he would come over and ask what I had. “Oh, I have this photo of Jerry in his underwear and a photo of Louie, here’s this one.” He would see something in it and make it into an ad. It was just being at the right place at the right time and transitioning from one to another.
Peter Gunn
How many zines do you think you’ve made?
Well zines are kind of crazy, I’ve made maybe 10… or 5 or 6. At the same time I got hooked up with Ray Potes at Hamburger Eyes and started to contribute to them. They published a few of my zines which was really rad. I’ve always made zines with my friends, Tim Brauch and different people, it was something to do, take your photographs and make it into a zine. At one point me and Ray Stevens had a DJ night at a local bar here. We would play punk records on one record player with 2 speakers. I actually made a zine every week for 3 or 4 years. It was before blogs, so instead of having a blog I made a zine about the week before and whatever happened that week. It would be like what happened at the last punk night, who got drunk, who made out, who barfed, those kinds of things. I think I have 160 or 170 of those.
Now, you have Seeing Things Gallery here in San Jose.
I was always doing different art and photography shows and things, then once the Print Exchange Program came around I started to curate that show. I brought it around to London, New York, Salt Lake City, all these different places. I started to figure out I was pretty good at putting together art shows and know a lot of different people from skateboarding. That’s basically what we show at the gallery, people that I know from skateboarding and the Print Exchange.
John Cardiel, fs slash
See Jai’s present and previous shows, as well as his books, at Seeingthingsgallery.com
