DIY UNDERGROUND SKATEPARKSA skateboarding book like no other, this collection of stunning color
photographs from around the world reveals an authentic, unsentimental
view of an often overglamorized subculture. The Irish photographer and
skateboarder Richard Gilligan spent four years traveling through Europe
and the US to photograph homemade skateparks. The resulting photographs
are not your run-of-the-mill action shots filled with miraculous body
moves, slashes, twists, and turns. Instead, Gilligan chooses to focus on
the sport's "negative space": the out-of-the-way concrete embankments,
nondescript suburban lots where kids come to practice, a simple wooden
ramp so insubstantial that no one but a skateboarder would recognize its
use. Many of these photographs can be appreciated as unique, if
prosaic, landscapes, but Gilligan also populates his pictures with
skaters at rest, smoking alone, hanging out together, or walking home,
board in hand. The images offer a grittily beautiful tribute to the
ineffable hunger that unites all skateboarders--young, old, rich, poor.
In these photographs Gilligan realizes the act of skating represents
more than a quest for glory, but a means of self expression. |
