Wires Crossed: Ed Templeton
Ed Templeton is my favourite skateboarder.
I remember coming to this realisation while watching him in Emerica’s This is Skateboarding on a tram ride into the city after school. I felt like I’d been smashed in the face. As dramatic as it sounds, my perspective on skateboarding changed almost immediately while watching Ed in that video, and I spiraled into a cycle of repetitively viewing all his parts, listening to Sonic Youth’s discography inside and out, and I gained a strong desire to do frontside noseblunts more than any other trick. As I began to develop an interest in photography, Ed’s work was the first place I turned. This introduction has basically turned into an ode to Ed, and I guess it is. It was always supposed to be.
This interview is about Ed’s latest photo book, Wires Crossed, which answers the question of what it was like to be a pro skater between 1995 and 2012. Featuring photos of some of your favourite skaters, including the Toy Machine and Emerica teams of the era. The book is available in May and is already available for pre-order here.
Congrats on Wires Crossed, Ed! How would you describe the book?
Wires Crossed is essentially my life’s work. I picked up a camera to document the skate culture I was surrounded by. This is the product of that. It’s a body of work about what it is like to be a pro skateboarder during a certain time period. The photos are from 1995 to 2012. In a way, I was trying to ask myself the question and be able to answer it for someone who isn’t a skateboarder, someone who’s just a photography fan, of ‘What was it like to be on the inside of skateboarding during that time period?’
Ultimately, once I started on it, I thought it could be a book or some kind of project at some point, and I never knew exactly when it would end. I’d been doing it for so long and kept skating for a long time. I retired at age 40, which is kinda old for a pro skateboarder. That was in 2012, and even then, it took me ten years for it to get to the point now where it’s ready to come out. It’s been a big project.
It looks like the book will answer that question. In the book, maps illustrate the early cross-country trips you did pre-photography. Is including these maps your way of acknowledging what wasn’t photographed?
Yeah, that’s an interesting thing because I didn’t really start shooting until 1995. I had a camera, but I wasn’t really thinking about this project or seriously thinking about photography before that. Those maps represent pre-this book. I included the maps because I wanted to somehow impress the viewer with how much road time is spent as a working pro skater. To show it feels like a rock band on tour: a lot of time on the road, a lot of boredom, and trying to stave off boredom by doing other things. Another thing is most of this work was done pre-cell phones. So, the boredom was a different kind of boredom [laughs]. Fireworks and lots of stupid things that kids would do on tour before everyone had social media to always occupy their brains.
There are interviews in the book as well. Who are those interviews with, and why did you add those in?
That came from working with Aperture, the publisher; they helped develop ideas. The interviews were one of those ideas. I interviewed Brian Anderson, Elissa Steamer, Erik Ellington, Justin Reagan, and Deanna, my wife, then Lesley, the head person at Aperture, interviewed me. I think, looking at the subject matter of the book, they thought we needed to put it into a certain context. As much as I resisted it at first, I think it ended up being a great move to put it in context and acknowledge the time that has passed since these photos were taken. Brian Anderson was in the closet in all these photos; he is famously out now. Elissa Steamer was confused in that department and is now with her girlfriend. All the people have gotten sober, looking back. They were all like I was: always drunk and always doing drugs. Having Deanna included adds another female voice to the book, and she was witness to everything; she went on all the tours with me and knew everybody, but also she is someone who can describe her experience of having her husband getting hurt all the time, breaking his neck and his leg and having concussions.
Some of it is kids doing stupid stuff, and, looking back, it is kind of embarrassing. Wrecking hotel rooms and, of course, all of the guys on the team chasing women and stuff, that stuff is documented here. I guess their view was this looks like a bunch of toxic masculinity, which is a term no one was thinking about when we were shooting this work, but it is now; as much as that sounds PC, I think it’s important to put it in context and at least show that we are aware of that aspect of what it was. We aren’t hiding that that’s what it was. It is a document of a certain time and space, and everyone has evolved. That’s why the interviews are important, too, because all those people doing things in the book have evolved and are different people now.
When did you come up with the name Wires Crossed, and what does it mean?
I’ve been calling it that forever because, to me, it describes skateboarders in general. To be a skateboarder, you have to have a wire loose somewhere; it is kind of abnormal in that respect. The brutality of it and how essentially how every part of it is illegal, being that most things you want to skate are on things people don’t want you to skate on. There is always that conflict with authority; it’s a constant struggle to find the right time to do it, and that might even be in the middle of the night with a generator, which just feels like you’re an outlaw. Then, of course, 80% of skateboarding is falling on cement, which takes a certain kind of toughness to do it. I’ve always thought that Wires Crossed is a code term for a skateboarder that’s got an extra gene in their body.
What was your process for selecting the photos?
I essentially looked at every photo I’ve ever shot and determined if it was about skateboarding and skateboarders and if it could be in the book. It only ended up being something like 4,500 images. Which is a lot, but it isn’t as crazy as you might think. I thought it might be like 20,000. I just started cutting it in half and in half again, and then at that point, you start thinking about how many photos can fit in a book. In a way, the target number is 300. I got down to 300 and started laying it out. Then support photos get put in that may have been taken out because they add colour to things; some of the 300 don’t end up making it in.
There is a scrapbook feel to the book with the handwritten journal entries, captions and notes, and the layouts of the photos. Was it a natural thing to have the book laid out in this way?
That started developing as I was making the layouts. The first layouts were just photos. Once I started getting to the back end of the book, I started figuring out what the titles were, where and when photos were shot. I started looking into the journals that I was writing while on trips. I would go into them and find that I’d have writing about a photo I took; I would be reading something and trying to find a date and then realise I actually wrote about a night I have photos in the book from. I decided to scan bits of text directly out of the journals and put them into the book. Which then ended up making it feel a little bit more scrapbooky. The book is filled with different layouts. It kind of goes back and forth from, like, straight photos on a white page to parts where there are lots of in-the-moment texts that speak directly to the photos. There are lots of really authentic bits that are straight out of the journals that speak to the photos.
The book is split up into themes. What are the themes, and what is their importance to the narrative of the book?
Yeah, I have themes about skateboarders vs cops and security, lust, boredom, acting like a rockstar, injuries. These are themes that I think are involved in the life of a pro skater.
The photo of Elissa Steamer jumping off the bridge is also the cover of the Toy Machine video, Jump Off a Building. What came first, the photo or the name?
I think the name came first and the photo came after. I feel like ‘Jump off a building’ was something that Bam would say. He would talk about skating gaps, and he was just saying, ‘I jump off buildings.’ I thought that was a good name for the video and said we should call the video Jump Off a Building, and he wrote it on his griptape after that. That bridge photo came after the fact. We were on tour in a town in New Hampshire called Laconia. In the foreground of that photo is Kerry looking up at Elissa, and he jumped right after that, but the cops came as he jumped and gave him a ticket. They busted us for jumping off the bridge. They said that a bunch of kids jump off the bridge and don’t realise that boats are coming and land on a boat and get hurt.
Do you feel like this is your The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in the sense you are documenting your culture and surroundings?
I mean that book was super influential in my deciding I wanted to pick up a camera in the first place. I don’t think it was as influential in the creation of this particular book, though. That book and Larry Clark’s Tulsa and Teenage Lust are what I credit for making me want to shoot photos. Those books made me realise you could shoot photos of your own group of people. Nan Goldin was shooting her friends and her scene in New York City, exporting that to the world and giving people a look into this subculture. Same as Larry Clark, looking at this subculture of druggy kids in Tulsa doing things that shocked people. It made me realise that I had this access that not a lot of people have. A lot of photographers might decide from a distance that skateboarders are cool, but you’ll always be an outsider. Skateboarders are wary of letting someone else come in and represent them. So, it would be hard to get that same access that I have. To get on a skate tour, for instance, there is only a certain amount of space, and we’re not going to let some random photographer document us.
Do you think those books changed your perspective of nudity in art and photography? I know your use of nudity hasn’t received the best reception from the skate community.
It’s hard to explain. I think there’s a Venn diagram of photography and skating; there is a definite crossover between people who get and like both. As far as nudity goes, to me, life is life, and nudity is a part of that. It’s funny because over the years, someone like Mike Burnett of Thrasher Magazine will always ask people like, ‘When did Ed ask you to get naked for a photograph?’ It’s an inside joke because I’ve never asked anyone on the team to get naked for a photo or anything like that. It’s just been someone like Brad Staba, who on a tour would walk out naked from the bathroom, and I’d be like if you’re going to walk out naked, I’m going to shoot a picture. All the nudity has been incidental. But then, in my own work, outside of skateboarding, there have been plenty of photos of Deanna and myself naked. When you decide to document your own life in that way, I feel like that is just part of that. I just don’t know how well the skate and art world mix in that respect.
You’ve travelled the United States inside and out for years—has it changed a lot?
Yeah, I mean, we just live in a weird ass world right now. Especially politically, over these past few years, it’s been really heightened and dangerous. I think the pandemic and social media have really changed people’s perceptions. As a photographer, it’s really hard sometimes to be out in the world shooting because everyone assumes that you’re shooting them to make fun of them on Instagram, so it’s become a little bit more difficult. Getting to travel abroad a lot, too, and coming back home has made me see America in a way different light. Especially where I live. California is a Liberal state who votes majority Democrat overall, but my county—Orange County—is particularly Republican. In my neighbourhood, there are like five or six houses flying Trump flags. Now with social media and with how everything is so heightened, I know exactly what these people believe. If you’re flying a Trump flag, you’re basically telling me you’re essentially a racist gun owner. Everything has gotten polarised, and there is an edge there. Now coming out of the pandemic, it has been interesting and a bit scary going out and shooting photos.
Pre-order Wires Crossed here
