The self-imposed constraints in our photography and video work
We're told to learn the rules, then break them. But what about some certain "unbreakable" ones — or what about not being aware you're following some? A rule-breaking skateboarder goes up against it.
I’ve recently taken a big step in life that is moving over a thousand miles south to be back home closer to family and friends. I detailed this in my most recent video project entitled Eight Years North.
Now that things are mostly settled with being back home in California, there’s been some time for reflection. I think this always tends to happen during the changing of seasons heading into winter, but the work on that video project was also a big impetus.
For the video, I had to comb through over eight years of footage exclusive to it, as well as even older footage for the intro. The nature of the footage was such that I didn’t know it was to be used for such a project — in fact, one of the main issues outlined in the video was that I didn’t really know what to do with it anyway. It encompassed broad collection of video clips from old skate videos, beautiful hiking trips in the northwest, lively events, and footage purposely gathered for the project (mostly in the second part).
This exercise opened up my mind to the fact that material doesn’t necessarily have to be gathered for a specific project (or even a project at all), pieced together, published, and then never revisited again as one moves on to the next thing. It made me examine my belief systems with regards to photography and video and assess where they came from. In all, I found some striking thought patterns that have definitely been weighing me down.
Now some of this may not be news to people, but it certainly was for me. This was actually a drastically different way of thinking, and I’ve started to understand why — and even work on a new photographic project to push these concepts further.
When I examine how I arrived at these thought patterns, it starts to make sense.
Skateboard media and its lasting influence
My primary driver for getting into photography and video was with the skateboarding photography and videos I worked on, generally from around 2005 - 2015. Within this timeframe, there are some distinct projects and “eras” that stand out.
In skateboard media, one typically starts out with mom or dad’s old handycam, and records their friends kickflipping off curbs and pushing mongo. As time goes on, they get their own camera and advance their filming and photographic technique alongside their and their friends’ skateboarding skills. Especially if said filmer/photographer gets injured to the point they can’t keep up with their friends who end up jumping down big stairsets and handrails. This, like many others, was my story.
These “eras” are clearly defined. There’s the beginning, starting around 2005, where the aforementioned middle-school mongo pushing, skin-tight jeans, and 3-stair ollies were so grotesque that it none of it sees the light of day. Around 2009 some footage started breaking out into early YouTube video montages. The remaining friends who didn’t quit skateboarding for high-school football or partying progressed to kickflipping bigger local stairsets and their first handrail boardslides. Then in 2011, I put together a video called Illicit. It was essentially a larger set of montages without defined parts, but it was the culmination of a set time period going out and purposely gathering footage for it, rather than just being out with a camera and recording clips until we filled up a song and published it. One could say it was the first time we started taking skateboard videos seriously. Shortly after, from 2012 to 2015, we worked on a definitive full-length skate video, called The Mob Rules, with defined parts for each skater or group of skaters. This was the “big” project. After it’s premiere, I moved north from California to Washington, stepping back from skateboarding and focusing on other genres of photography.
Because skateboarders progress at such a rapid rate, one never intermixes footage of their first pop shuv-its and boardslides with their latest footage for a project. One simply gathers their best tricks over a loose timeframe and puts out a video part. Once that part is released into the world, that footage is done and over with. Not only that, but skateboarding can be so fickle and opinionated that some skateboarders might not skate the same spots that they themselves had previously skated, or even spots that have been skated by others in the same video.
Photographs and music selection in skateboarding are the same way. Once a photo is run in some publication or a song is used by any other skateboarder, it’s pretty much never seen nor heard again. There exists an extensive database of skate videos that catalogs the songs that were used in them, and you’d best skateboarders consult it regularly.
The early 2010s were also an interesting time as videographers moved from standard definition to high definition formats and their respective 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. This was a fraught debate in skateboarding on which was “better;” SD or HD. This battle interestingly still goes on today, over a decade later, with many filmers still using and preferring the SD format. Though the debate continues, one thing that most agree on is that mixing the formats should be avoided at all costs.
As skateboarding was my first foray into photography and video, these laws were etched into my brain. Break any of these, even accidentally or inadvertently, and you and your work are summarily dismissed as wack — a fate as bad as purgatory.
Now, to a large degree, it makes sense. Film and TV don’t reuse footage, outside of things like flashbacks to drive the narrative, right? And they certainly don’t (unintentionally) mix SD and HD formats. Though music is certainly less of a hard line outside of skateboarding.
So therein lies the problem.
As I transitioned away from skateboarding at the release of The Mob Rules, these laws and linear project-based thinking were ingrained as de facto rules. I photographed weddings and events for a while, and these ways of working still made sense. For obvious reasons, when an event is wrapped up, so is the media (unless you’re grabbing portfolio selections, of course).
But what happens when the genre of one’s photography or video work doesn’t fit so neatly in a little time-bound, project-based, law-abiding box?
A muddy outlook on a muddy project
As I started studying photography from a more artistic perspective, I started documenting the town I grew up in, Camarillo. This has been my most prominent project outside of skateboarding and long time focus, with some of the earliest photos from about 2010. The town itself is an hour from the sprawl of Los Angeles and has continually tried to resist the sprawl and position itself and its open agricultural land as a respite from the concrete jungle. Yet, as the city’s growth and need for housing continues, the farmland is turned over for new subdivisions, strip malls, and schools — and once it’s built up, there’s no going back.
This body of work that I’m calling Field Closed for Maintenance seems to be a pretty straightforward project-based… project: pictures of the town and its landscape undergoing development. Yet it’s nowhere near as straightforward as one might think.
Of the multitude of questions and challenges in the project, a crucial one is when does this project end? It’s been going on almost 15 years, but the development of the farmland is still continuing. Does it end when there is no farmland left? Will that even be in my lifetime? Do I just put together a portfolio/book/volume that is these first 15 years and add more to it later? Then when putting something together, how would I arrange it? Linearly, oldest to newest? But maybe that ruins some of the more exciting contrasts, like the two images above taken 11 years apart. These questions were so simple in my previous genres. Pretty much non-questions: gather enough footage to fill up some songs and call it done. Or, shoot the wedding, edit the pictures, and send them out.
But that’s only the first of many the challenging questions.
On a more technical level, how does one rectify that these images were taken across so many different “new camera” eras? Photographers throughout, but especially early on in their journeys, will try out dozens of combinations of digital cameras, lenses, and even film types and formats.
Unfortunately, this project suffers from and is no stranger to that fact. To give an idea in addition to the example images above, some key images are made up of expired color film from point and shoot 35mm cameras, tons of black and white Ilford HP5 through a Leica, some glaringly obvious 42-megapixel digital camera files, and more recently, low-contrast and tonally perfect 6x7 medium format color film. That’s just about everything under the sun to reckon with. But even worse, I have video clips of certain pre-construction farmlands that weren’t photographed. One could make the case for grabbing a video still from these to drive the narrative — but that would be totally crazy, right?
This goes back to those aforementioned laws — you should stick to one format and style, right? Imagine if Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi was instead of consistent color 8x10 film, a collection of haphazard camera format and film choices. Would it still have the same impact? I digress… But one more quandary presents itself.
Thematically, I’ve always thought of this project as being one that is just of Camarillo, but what happens when one finds and photographs this same theme repeating across the forested Seattle suburbs, in the arid Eastern Washington plains, and the vast Californian desert cities? Do they stay separate, or does the body of work expand to include those?
It’s an interesting set of questions and considerations that I’ve never quite come up with good answers for. Instead, I’ve just continued shooting more for the project(s) and have continued to defer the decision-making for later — whenever that is. However, this is where Eight Years North and one other project I’ve recently started working on have helped me find some potential resolutions.
The art of rule-breaking
In the Eight Years North video, I had to include some old footage from The Mob Rules to assemble the intro. The majority of the video was shot in 4K and these early shots came from cameras that topped out at 720p… But at least it was the right aspect ratio. So naturally, these problems — and violations of my “media moral compass” — were overcome for the necessity of the storyline. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a bit of reluctance at first.
As I revisited these files, it occurred to me that there are so many great skateboarding video clips and images that are buried on my hard drives, which didn’t make the cut for whatever projects at the time. A lot of these are an almost nostalgic slice-of-life: the footage of getting kicked out of a skate spot, the hanging-out, the partying, the funny happenings on the street, and, yes, even the stuff of us as little kids pushing mongo.
I realized that when and if assembled into a photo book, these could tell an interesting story of a bunch of suburban kids getting into skateboarding and becoming classical skateboarding miscreants. But to do so would mean I’d have to transcend the artificial boundaries that I’d unknowingly held firmly in my beliefs. It would mean not only using 720p video captures and old Canon Rebel DSLR images, but even the 320x240 Flip video camera files, cell phone snaps, and 3 megapixel images from mom’s Nikon CoolPix. It would even mean breaking down the time based barriers between the later skate video projects. Totally breaking all my rules, and some I didn’t even realize were rules, like grabbing low-res video frames for still images.
So I did just that, and I’ve never been more stoked.
I spent a few weeks combing through terabytes of old video clips and images from tens of thousands of horribly unorganized folders. I started weaving together a layout and narrative with InDesign. I cropped images aggressively to focus on the subject (breaking another rule I adhered to: no cropping), up-rezed tiny video stills, and gave no caution to camera, format, color, resolution, project, date, or time. Everything from 2005 onward was on the table, even recent stuff not directly depicting skateboarders or skateboarding. This was no time for overthinking. If it adds to the story, it’s up for consideration. Rules be damned.
And you know what? It just worked — and it felt liberating.
The ease at which I went about this massive undertaking and threw caution to the wind was, frankly, surprising, given how much I’d fret over previous and current projects. But I think that the acceptance of using what I have, combined with a strong enough vision for the project, made it easy to go forth.
After all, I can’t go back and reshoot any of this stuff, and everything is need is already all there. There’s still some work to be done with the exact image choices, order, and layout; as well as logistics with printing, but these are more of just doing the work, as opposed to overcoming challenging subconscious philosophical quandaries.
While working on Eight Years North had helped bring an understanding that these mental constraints were present, the work for the in-progress skateboarding book certainly made a big stride in overcoming them.
The elephant in my room, Field Closed for Maintenance, certainly still has its challenges, especially with when to put an end (or soft-ending) to it, but consciously addressing the self- and societally-imposed constraints has certainly improved my outlook on it and all my work. Maybe I do decide to experiment a little more than I’ve allowed myself to and see what happens.
All told, as beginners in photography and video, we’re often told that we should learn the rules, and then break them. Of course this makes sense — and I thought I was doing that. And as a skateboarder, we’re hopping fences and breaking rules all the time to skate at new spots. I’ve always felt like a rule-breaker.
But deciding to shoot a portrait of someone as a horizontal landscape image, as opposed to a “proper” vertical portrait is not really what I think is meant. It goes, and should go, deeper than that. If I have to mix old footage and new to tell a story, so what? If I have to use color and black and white images of different formats in the same book, so what? If I have to aggressively crop an already-small image to get the point across, so what? And so on, and so on — down the list of the conscious and unconscious rules.
These are the rules worth breaking. Because without realizing, they are what’s standing in the way of publishing something meaningful.
Thank you for reading my first Substack post. I’ve always loved writing about photography and my thoughts behind it, and am very excited to see and contribute to these emerging photography and art-related communities.
I’ve published blogs on my website sporadically for over a decade, but what’s most exciting here is the ability to get to read new voices and make new friends — you know, how social media used to be. A quick shameless plug: I hope to get that skateboarding book finalized and out for print next year, so please follow along if you’d like to find out more as it comes together!