How did you get started with Slam, and then become editor?
The first thing I was doing was submitting a few photos, sending slides of a few of my friends in to Andrew Currie, who had been the editor since he was sixteen, and he ran a couple of photos. Slam only came out every three months, and at that time it was probably anywhere between forty and sixty pages long. Then I got to meet Currie, and I would travel up to Queensland and stay with those guys, and they would travel down to Sydney and stay with me. Al Boglio and Christian West and the Kovac brothers and a good crew of a few others.
Then at the beginning of 1994 Currie moved to the States to turn pro for Santa Monica Airlines, and he asked me if I would edit the magazine when he went away. I was shitting bricks, because I’d only been shooting for a year-and-a-half at that point.
What was the first US mag that you were published in?
I first sent slides to Lance Dawes in 1992, for a little Slap Australia report. It wasn’t entirely my photos, there was stuff from guys in Melbourne and Queensland, but I packaged it all up and sent it together, and I wrote the article with Currie. It was cool because they ran our stuff, and that meant a lot to some teenagers from Australia.
I also sent slides to Transworld and they ran one or two photos, which was a bit of a buzz back then. I was shooting Slam, but at the same time if I had extra stuff that I thought was really good I would send it to Slap, Big Brother, Transworld and Thrasher. Mostly I was shooting for Slam magazine, but if I had something extra, every couple of months I might try to send something. I think I shot a photo of Currie that got used on a 411 VHS cover too so that was a buzz.
Eddie Martin, Ben Harris and Greg Stewart - Melbourne 1995
How did you get on Slap staff?
Lance Dawes was the one I kept in touch with the most and Slap was, in my mind, if not the better magazine, certainly my favourite. Thrasher wasn’t really as looked up to as it is now, and it was still good to get a photo in there, but I liked Slap more.
I’d been sending photos to Lance, and I did a trip to Japan with him for Slap. After that I did a Europe trip, and then Lance came out to Australia and we did a trip to Uluru. On that trip he asked me to come over to the States and work for them. I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’, I didn’t even think that would be possible, but he suggested it and then I sort of had to work the rest of it out for myself. Lance gave me the keys and didn’t ask a lot of questions. He was always encouraging.
Was it a big risk to quit as editor of Slam to be a staff photographer for Slap? Who did you know out there?
I was running Slam magazine, as editor, but only for one year around 1995. It was 1998 that I moved over to New York to work for Slap as a staff photographer. It was a risk in some way; I was invited to go over there on the promise of a staff position and a work visa and all that stuff and it ended up working out. Lance had a pretty good eye on a lot of California but fortuitously for me, I was such a fan of that East Coast style of skating and they didn’t really have any staff photographers out there. Pete Thompson had gone on to shoot for Transworld, so by sheer luck there was a bit of a pocket for me on the East Coast.
I knew Keith Hufnagel, I knew Peter Bici, Chris Keeffe and I knew Giovanni Estevez. Maybe a few other people. Keith called me not long before I was set to move over there to tell me a room had become available. It was Scott Johnston’s old room, and Catharine Lyons from Rookie was running the apartment. I’d never met her but she gave the thumbs-up that I could live there, so I just moved in. I arrived in New York City with a bag on my shoulder and no set of keys in May 1998.
The room had about four inches on each side of a small futon bed, a desk and a closet and that was it. No air conditioner. It was on the corner of W. 24th Street and 9th Avenue and when I moved in the rent was $360 per month.
Me and Andrew Currie were leaving to go on a Silverstar tour down the East Coast the following day, so we had to sit there and wait on the stoop until Catharine got home from work at a bar so she could let us in! It was about 4am by the time we got upstairs, but she became a great friend immediately and looked out for me majorly.
Keith Hufnagel - Lipslide - NYC 1997
You were the new photographer in town, but did you know Reda and Dimitry at that point?
I’d met Dimitry the first time I ever came over to America, when we were both shooting the ASR trade show in San Diego in 1994. I met him on the platform of a vert ramp, which is crazy because he’s this Coney Island, Brooklyn, guy. He asked me how to shoot vert, and Hosoi emptied his pockets out in front of us and he had a bong, a rabbit’s foot and all these lucky charms. He had twenty or thirty items coming out of his pockets. I think by the time I moved to NYC, Dimitry was already living in California
First time I met Reda was after I got back from the Silverstar tour. I got back to New York in June and one of the first times I went to skate the banks, he was there. He asked me if I shot skating, I said yeah, and he’s like, “I heard you’re from Australia. Do you shoot covers?”, and I said yeah, and he said, “How many?”, and I said, “I dunno, maybe twenty or thirty”, and he said, “Alright, we’re friends”. Then he said I should come to his house in Brooklyn and we’d go fishing, and we’ve been friends ever since that. He was always very welcoming, and he never threw any weird shade towards me, ever.
Do you ever shoot with the cover in mind?
Sometimes when you’ve shot a photo you know it’s cover-worthy, but there’s a lot of other crap that goes into it so I prefer not to think about it. Obviously it’s great to get a cover but I don’t go running around looking for cover-worthy spots. You just try and shoot each photo in its own merits. You shoot it the best way you can. What if you shot something to be a cover and it looks much better as a double-page spread and they ran it as a cover and you never got to show anyone the rest of the picture? Putting a photo on a cover can ruin a great photo sometimes too, so there’s that to think about as well. I try not to get stuck on it.
Max Schaff - Fs Ollie - Five Dock Sydney 1995
Was shooting skateboarding paying the bills when you moved to New York?
I didn’t have another job, but I will say that for the first six months I didn’t get paid, because I had to pay for my own work visa. I eventually did get paid but for the first six months I was just living off of my savings, and I didn’t have very many savings because I’d worked for a quarterly magazine with no salary. So I moved over there thinking I had a job and then I found out it wasn't that simple. Things just moved a bit differently back in those days. So I didn’t have another job but I was shooting skate photos all day and all night.
The cost of living was about four or five bucks a day: a slice of pizza was $1.50, subway token $1.50, peach Snapple $1, and maybe go to an art show if there was free pizza and booze.
Bobby Puleo - Ollie - NYC 1998
Did you have an exclusive contract with Slap?
There was a loyalty handshake with Fausto that I wouldn’t submit work to other magazines. In ’96 I shot a Jason Ellis Pro Spotlight for Transworld, and Fausto had seen that—so he was quite anti-me shooting for other magazines—and then in ‘97 I went on a Zero tour for Transworld, that went all around the States and ended up back in San Diego. That was the same trip I shot the lipslide photo of Huf in NYC that ended up being the centre spread of his Transworld Spotlight. So I turned in all my film to Transworld and I was in the car with Jamie Thomas and he gets a phone call. It’s Daniel Harold Sturt and he says there’s something going on this weekend and he’s looking for Danny Way and where he’s jumping out the helicopter. Jamie didn’t know where it was happening. Sturt hangs up.That’s weird because everybody in the office was super hush-hush about it, and I’m the young outsider Australian. I got a sense that there was something going on but I wasn’t privy to it. You could tell with the chitter-chatter.
By sheer coincidence of timing I fly to San Francisco on the Sunday night because on the Tuesday I was set to fly to Europe to do all the contests, Münster and Wembley and all of those, with the Toy Machine team. Lance at Slap had set it up for me.
So I get to the Thrasher office on the Monday and I get chewed out by Fausto, like, “What’s this about you shooting for other magazines?! We give you film so you’ve got to give the shots to us! How do we know you’re not going to do that in Europe?”, and I’m like, “Well, you just have to believe me”. Lance kinda threw me into the lion’s den, so I had a handshake agreement with Fausto and it looked like he would kick my arse if I broke my word.
As I went into the office with Lance on the Tuesday, before flying out, a FedEx parcel arrived and Sturt had poached the Danny Way helicopter jump in the airfield in Tijuana, Mexico, and he’d FedExed the prints to Jake Phelps at Thrasher. I was in Jake Phelps’ office when they opened that FedEx package, but I got yelled at by Fausto for even the suggestion that I might use any film that he’d given me to send photos to another magazine. That was at the time when Sturt had decided to not send Transworld any photos because he was beefing about a number of things, so he did it just as a lark, and his credibility rating for me was maximum at that point. Getting to see those prints first-hand before they ran was pretty exciting.
Anthony Pappalardo - NYC 2003
How was it shooting with Bobby Puleo? Is he very particular about the way he wants to be shot?
Yes, but not in the way that he would speak about it. It was more of a gut thing. A lot of shooting with Bobby was pushing around and around, and sometimes he would be like, ‘Hey, I’ve found this spot to skate and I’m going to try and do something on it’, and sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t be able to because the spots would be too fucked.
The searching around was often as interesting as watching him do the tricks on the really awkward things. It was all part of it. I would never have gone to half the places I went in New York if I wasn’t with that guy. I went down into the tunnels at 108th Street and saw some of the graffiti down there. The shooting-photos part was great, but thinking back on it, he was just a very curious and knowledgeable guy about New York and the Boroughs and the different bridges. He’s a straight-shooting short Italian guy from New Jersey, and he’s a bit of a living legend.
What I relished most about those times was the searching, the finding and getting to know places I didn’t know about already.
Kyle Leaper - Nose Manual - Sydney 2011
When did the conversation with Aaron Meza about working at Skateboarder come up?
At some point Lance was… I wouldn’t say he was over being the editor of Slap, but he was just trying to make a change in his life. I had worked for Slap for maybe two years at that point and it wasn’t going badly. Skateboarder had just started back out and it was looking really good. They were only two times a year at that point but they were about to go monthly.
I wouldn’t say I knew Aaron well, but he was in and out of the Slap office a little bit at the time, and we had met a few times, and he was cool. I was in LA one time and I was walking across the street with him after being at breakfast with Huf and Scott Johnston and a few other people, and I don’t know if he’d heard that I was worried about what was going to happen with Slap but he just asked me, “Why don’t you come and work with us?”
It was probably a couple of months before I called him back and asked if he was for real, and he said he was, and I asked him what the deal with a work visa was and that was all pretty solid. So when I made the decision and I told Lance he said it was fine. A lot of things had changed at Slap that he wasn’t very happy about and I just generally felt like he was on the way out anyway, and he was like a mentor to me so I really looked up to what he was doing. So the confluence of the fact that he was leaving and Meza asking how I’d feel about working for Skateboarder, helped make the decision to work for Skateboarder. That was in 2000.
I flew up to Thrasher to tell Fausto, just out of respect, because I’d heard all the stories of Mic-E Reyes giving Danny Gonzalez a beating for leaving Deluxe, and they had the reputation of blood-in, blood-out. So I went up there to face the Don, and hoped I wasn’t going to get my lights punched out, and fortunately he was not in that day but as soon as I go upstairs I saw Jake Phelps, and before I could even open my mouth he said, “Huh, so you’re going to work for Skateboarder, kid?”, and I’m like, “Uh… Uh…”, and he says, “That’s cool. Meza’s cool. Good luck”. I didn’t have to explain myself or nothing.
AVE - Straight over to Nosegrind - NYC 2007
Slap wasn’t the same without Lance.
It became its own thing without Lance. He had his own flavour. For me, Lance is one of the all-time not only skate photographers, but editorial photographers, because he could shoot a great music portrait for an interview, he could shoot artists, and he shot a closeup of the baseplate of a skateboard and ran that as a cover of a magazine and to this day I still think that’s one of the sickest covers that anyone’s ever done.There was so much flavour editorially that I don’t think any magazine had matched until that point, or since, in terms of the cultural coverage as well as insanely good skateboarding and really wicked and precise renegade skate photography between him and Gabe Morford. To me that’s one of the golden eras of skate editorial, the way they did the layouts and the cool photos of Huf and everybody in New York as well as the streets of San Francisco. There was so much going on and they just got it right.
How different was it, working for Skateboarder?
One of reasons I had an immediate affinity with Meza when I started working for Skateboarder was the type of magazines he was reading himself. He was a big music fan so he was reading The Face, i-D, NME. He has a heavy metal background but he’s been through all those Girl and Chocolate videos where he used great hip-hop tracks and R&B, and he had a lot of good outside influences besides just looking at skate mags. He had great ideas for articles, like the best ever examples of certain tricks, Skate Anatomy with the injuries, all that stuff.
He had some discretion with the layouts; they were never over-the-top, they were very clean. He was inspired by that simplistic photo journalistic layout and we were always buying books and going to the newsstand and looking at other things. He had good taste in terms of what to put in and what to leave out, and that was a very appealing part of working with him. Chris Yormick was a brilliant art director and super laid-back East Coast graffiti legend.
We got the sense that he was really trying to build a team at Skateboarder—he would take us to skate curbs at lunch—and there was a big push to be like a band, basically, when it was me, Oliver and Meza, and then Ben Colen when he came in a littler later. I felt like we were really jamming there. It was good fun!
We were pushing each other, but not in a competitive way. We played off each other a little bit, I would think. Who’s got the cover this month, who’s got a spread, who’s got a cool portrait, who’s got a cool idea for an article… That type of thing.
Towards the end it got a bit serious. I knew Meza was trying to push me to shoot certain people that he thought we should be having in the magazine. People that I had absolutely no interest in, the way they skated or what type of tricks they were doing. But that was all part of it really and my own insecurities and opinions may have got me in trouble a few times, but never beef.
We were in an office building in LA, but the general vibe of it was still pretty informal. In terms of it being office cubicles and that, it was a bit weird. Some of the Skateboarder magazine ‘creative hubs’, if you want to call them that, looked like Ricky Gervais’s The Office space. Brown, beige, cubicles and the boss’s office, and so-and-so gets to sit down the hall… It was really weird but I think Meza was keen to have an office in Los Angeles rather than down in Orange County, which is where the surfing publishers were.
I worked there until 2004, so a solid four years, and it was around then—2003 or ’04—that Transworld was peaking and it was absolutely huge, so there was a real sense that we had to do more advertising-based content. I wouldn’t say that we had to pander to the advertisers but there was definitely a push because they were struggling to get the advertising dollars to pay all the staff photographers and everything else, and something just wasn’t working out.
As a lot of people did at that time, they tried to push their editorial content away from what made it popular and it was quite jarring for people like me and Oliver Barton. Him coming from the streets of London and then having to sit in an office… It’s kind of the opposite of what you’d think it was supposed to be at the time.
Mike Carroll - Kickflip - LA 2002
What have you had to shoot that you weren’t into?
I once fell asleep shooting a photo of Kristian Svitak trying a lipslide on a small kinked handrail. We got to this spot at 11.30pm and we didn’t get out of there until 2.30am and I think he may have jumped on the rail four times. He would just roll up and stop. For three hours. I was falling asleep with the camera up against my face in between tries. No offence to Kristian, he was trying to get it, but that was a rough one. He’s gnarly though for sure, I was definitely just overtired.
Who’s done something straight away?
The immediate one that comes to mind is when Shane Cross nosegrinded El Toro first try. There’s been a few others.
Eric Koston - Fs Ollie - Sydney 2004
How did your time at Skateboarder there come to an end?
I was friends with Skin for a very long time before. He had come to Australia in ’96 or ’97 so I’d met him before moving to America—he lived in Sydney for six months—and we’d kept in touch. Skateboarder was getting thinner and thinner, and by strange timing, Grant, Swift, Atiba, and all those guys were leaving Transworld to start The Skateboard Mag, and that left Skin as editor of Transworld with essentially no staff photographers except Seu Trinh who was a staff photographer for Dwindle at the time anyway, I believe.
Skin just approached me and offered me a staff position, and said he’d take care of my Green Card, and it was more money than what I was currently making at Skateboarder. Not a lot more, but the rumours were going around that Skateboarder was going out of business so if that happened, I would probably lose my work visa. It was a tough time really, because Skin also was hoping that Meza would come and work for Transworld, but Meza had loyalty to San Francisco and he sees himself as more of a Thrasher-type guy, and for him there was no way he would even consider being the editor of Transworld. For Oliver and I, we’d moved away from our countries, our families and our culture to pursue this job and at the end of the day it’s about shooting skateboarding. If your magazine’s going to go out of business, you're going to lose your opportunity to be doing what you love, what are you supposed to do? For me, it came down to survival, because I wanted to keep doing what I wanted to do.
So I decided to work for Transworld. I took Meza to breakfast and he was not too happy about it, but we ended up putting it behind us and we’re still quite good friends to this day. It was tough at the time because I left and then I think within an hour or two, Oliver called and told him he was leaving as well.
I started at Transworld in 2004 and then in 2012 I got put on a retainer, so I was still a staff photographer but I wasn’t essentially an employee anymore. January 2015 was when Jaime Owens called me and told me I wasn’t on a retainer anymore.
What was your day-to-day like at Transworld?
I lived in Los Angeles so I was not really down in the office as much. I was travelling a lot. That was also when I started shooting a lot of other types of photography on my own.
When I started working at Transworld, none of the staff that I looked up to —besides Skin—like Grant and Dave and Atiba, were there. It was kinda like buying someone else’s car that had won a big race. It was great in a way, I was excited for the opportunity and it was great that Oliver came across at the same time because we were definitely contemporaries and he was out there doing it so I didn’t feel as alone.
Alex Olson - Ollie - Sydney 2007
Does shooting skateboarding ever bum you out?
Looking back I probably no-ed myself out of a job several times, but Lance Dawes used to have this thing, ‘Stay rebel, stay sharp’, which basically means, don’t give in and keep being as good as you can at what you’re doing. Even skateboard photography can feel a bit predictable and weak and I’ve really tried my best to steer away from that if I can. Having said that, shooting editorials and skate trips, there’s been a couple where I wasn’t that excited about it, but how can you even complain about shooting skateboarding for a living? It doesn’t even sound like a real job.
It does get difficult, when you’ve got your sights set on a certain type of skater or a certain type of city or a certain style of skating and then you have to go somewhere and try to make something look cool that’s not really your cup of tea. But the act of shooting skating itself never bummed me out. More so the job part of it, but that’s any job really. Overall it’s been great. Still is.
And skateboard photography changed.
Some types of skating are insane, and it’s quite hard to shoot it and do it justice because it’s so massive or something. It becomes almost like architectural photography rather than action photography, with this small skater somewhere in the landscape of this massive stair set or obstacle, and if you get it right it can look absolutely brilliant and terrifying, which is how it should look, but there’s something nice about catching a photo that just feels like skateboarding.
Somebody like Matt Price can make it look fun, as well as interesting and gnarly. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s also dangerous and thrilling and gnarly and all those things, but didn’t everyone step on it in the first place to have fun? Is there a person who stepped on a skateboard for the first time and said, ‘I’m doing this because I want to learn to grind a 28-stair handrail’?
Keenan Milton - Switch Crook - Sydney 1999
Have you ever missed a photo?
I definitely remember two things, and they’re both Lance Mountain related. The first one is when Bob Burnquist did the loop in 2002 with no runway, just pumping and going round, which was the cover of Skateboarder magazine. I had set that up on the big medium format camera, with all the flashes, and he was warming up for quite a while so I thought he was probably only going to do it once, so I put a tripod—which I never use—right next to me with my Nikon F5 on it which shoots six frames per second on film. Lance Mountain was at the sesh, and he’s quite an accomplished photographer already, so I asked Lance if he could hit the sequence as Bob went around, because I was using the Mamiya medium format camera which is heavy so I needed two hands for it to shoot the still.
I had a feeling, from the attempts that he was trying with the mats there, that he was going to make it. Sure enough he makes it first try, I hit my shutter and ba-boomph—the flashes pop—and I looked at Lance and he shrugs and pulls a blank face. I asked him what happened and he said he just froze. I got back to Skateboarder on the Monday, waited for the film, took the film into Meza and he says he’s going to use it for the cover for sure, and he asks where the sequence is, for the contents page to show that he made it. I had to tell him what happened. He asked if I could go back and get Bob to do it again, and it might have been my skate photographer’s intuition, but that was a no.
Another one was on a Nike tour in Australia, and I shot what for sure was one of the best photos I’ve ever shot of Grant Taylor. He ollied off a piece of cement about a board’s width wide over a channel into a halfpipe that has no flat bottom. I shot it over the top looking down, a fisheye photo, and it just went perfectly from left to right like an S-bend.
That same night there was a big bowl jam at the Belconnen bowl in Canberra, and I shot the front cover of Skateboarder’s Journal, Lance Mountain frontside inverting the big four-foot channel. Everyone was carrying on into the night, and I’m backing up the photos from the day, and to be fair we were all sort of carrying on a bit. But we sat around in the hotel going through all the photos from the trip with Lance, Peter Hewiit, Chet Childress and a few others until 4am.
We had a 6am flight to Melbourne, and then I get back to Los Angeles a month later and I go into the folder to get the files for the article, and the folder is just empty. There’s nothing in there. I had not backed up the RAW file. I fluffed it. That’s the only one where I saw the photo on the screen and it was money, and I went to put it together and it had gone. If you get excited and open it in Photoshop, and you don’t back up the file to a hard drive and then you close Photoshop, it isn’t saved because I erased the file from the memory card. What was equally humbling was that he went and reshot it with Rhino a couple of years ago on an Indy trip. Whoopsie-daisy. Sorry Grant.
Jason Dill - Sydney 2009
What are the other differences, for you, between film and digital?
Nowadays having digital, it erases that need for trust that the skater has for the photographer. Rather than not knowing if you’ve got it, you can just review it. I heard some guys don’t even sit around for the make nowadays, they get out of the way so the video guy can get it.
Back then, shooting with film, I feel like it was held in much higher regard to get something published. You know the photographer had to wait at the lab, you know he had to cart the film back from Bristol to London or through an x-ray machine from Sydney to LA or wherever, just through the pure fact that there wasn’t another option to do it any faster. With that came a real camaraderie, and I wouldn’t say it’s missing nowadays, but you could shoot something and the skater will be, ‘Oh, can I get that for my Instagram?’, so that side of it’s cheapened. The fact is that you’re going to see it on a phone anyway even if it’s published in a magazine. It’s rarer to sit down and touch the thing and read it.
There was the not knowing if you’d got the shot, and then there was not knowing if you’ve got the shot published, when it has to go through another round of opinions and subjectivity. Maybe it should be the pushing photo, maybe it should be the best trick, but then maybe the magazine has run ten best tricks, there’s all these levels of interpretation beyond just hitting the ‘like’ button. The channels of approval were much longer. I like that nervous feeling, it’s like being out in the wild with a piece of string trying to catch a fish.
Published in North 39