The Search
I have been busy for two years going through my archive of skate photos to choose what to put in my 1980s book, coming out in 2020. You might think that my archive is sequestered away in a hermetically sealed vault in my basement; well, you thought wrong—I live in California and we don’t have basements. My photos from forty or so years of shooting, or at least from the years I was shooting film before the digital age, are stored in metal file cabinets and plastic tubs in my garage, and the organization is a bit haphazard—in fact, it’s a downright mess. I have spent hours and hours sitting in the space where cars should reside, poring over tens of thousands of black and white 35mm film negatives and color transparencies, until I have felt like I might go mad!
Well, during those exhaustive searches, I unearthed many unseen and unpublished photographic gems from the recesses of the dark containers.
There are skaters from what I call the Golden Age of Skateboarding, the 1980s, when skateboarding was evolving, finding itself, and maturing into what it would become in the future; I call these skaters the Legends. I have been searching those bins for those Legends: Hawk, Gonzales, Blender, Mullen, Miller, Caballero, and Hosoi, just to name a few. I get excited every time I dive in and come up with an image I haven’t gazed at for thirty-plus years, and if it has the name Natas Kaupas written on it, I get extra excited. These two images of Natas are a couple of the lost gems I was able to extract from the pile of Whatevers. For some reason, these two jewels never ran in Transworld.
I am making high-quality, archival prints of these Natas photos available in my shop. You can read more about them there and even purchase one or two, if you’re jonesing for a little piece of skate photo history.
By the way, The Search goes on, so stay tuned.