Photobook: Wires Crossed by Ed Templeton

A visceral account of 90s Pro skateboarding. Polaroids, diary-entries and photographs from life on the road.

Photography and skateboarding. Two inseparable parts of a cultural zeitgeist. The halcyon days of which were the mid-nineties. In Wires Crossed photographer and two-time world skateboarding champion Ed Templeton invites us into the reality and fantasy of 90s pro skateboarding.

Wires Crossed features collages of Polaroids, notes, maps and photos. It is a multifaceted diary of pro skate tours that criss-crossed America. These aren’t your Redbull, live-streamed, stadium-rock skate tours of today. This is rolling in to town to find new gaps and lines to ride with the locals. It’s killing time between skating searching for highs that might come close to the feeling of skating. This is wiping out and losing substantial amounts of skin, then getting back up again.

I don’t skate, it isn’t a subculture I’ve ever belonged to (hours lost to Tony Hawks on the PS2 don’t count). But this book drew me in. The photography as perfect in its imperfections as the subjects themselves.

Simply by being a book of images from the late 90s and early 2000s it creates in the reader a certain nostalgia. Polaroids, getting your film back from the store and handwriting notes in scrapbooks. Though for most of us those memories lead us back to family holidays or student revelry. Not the extremes of human endurance and pain documented in Wires Crossed.

Some of my favourite images are those hand coloured by ink or highlighter pen.

A huge thanks to Val and Pete for getting me this book for Christmas.

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Thanks for reading,

Rob