Southern California is the birthplace of skateboard culture and,
even though skateparks may be found worldwide today, it is where
these parks continue to flourish as architects, engineers and
skateboarders collaborate to refine their designs. The artist Amir
Zaki grew up skateboarding, so he has an understanding of these
spaces and, as someone who has spent years photographing the built
and natural landscape of California, he has a deep appreciation of
the large concrete structures not only as sculptural forms, but
also as significant features of the contemporary landscape,
belonging to a tradition of architecture and public art. To capture
the images in this book, Zaki photographed in the early-morning
light, climbing inside the bowls and pipes while there were no
skaters around. Each photograph is a composite of dozens of shots
taken with a digital camera mounted on a motorized tripod head. The
resulting images are incredibly high resolution and can be printed
at a large scale with no loss of detail. Their look is unusual in
that Zaki's lens is somewhat telephoto, which has the effect of
flattening space, yet the angle of view is often quite wide, which
exaggerates spatial depth. The technology also allows Zaki to
photograph certain areas from difficult positions that would
otherwise be impossible to capture. Zaki makes the point that, by
climbing deep inside these spaces, the visual experience is
fundamentally different from viewing them from outside. In his
text, Tony Hawk - one of world's best-known professional
skateboarders - describes how Zaki's photographs of empty
skateparks and open skies evoke memories of the idyllic freedom and
the sense of potential that he felt when he first visited a
skatepark as a child and saw skaters flying like birds in and out
of the concrete pools and bowls. Hawk has skated in some of the
parks featured in this book, and for him several of Zaki's images,
taken from the skater's perspective, recall the experience of
trying to learn a particular trick. A beautiful full pipe that
looks like a barrelling wave may be, for Hawk and other seasoned
skateboarders, a perfect example of function and form fitting
together flawlessly in a well-designed skatepark. In his essay, the
Los Angeles-based architect Peter Zellner offers a different
perspective. Skateparks are made by excavating large open areas of
land within city parks. The forms inside them may represent ocean
waves, mountainous terrain and other features from nature, but they
are permanently frozen in cement like Brutalist architecture. Every
shape, line, transition, hip, tombstone, coping, stair, flow, tile,
bowl, pipe, spine, rail, ledge, roll-in, kidney, clover, square and
bank serves a specific purpose - to provide a challenging thrill
and maximum pleasure for the rider. In this sense, skateparks
epitomize function over form. In Zaki's mesmerizing photographs,
however, these concrete landscapes suggest a more complex and
integrated relationship with the history of design and architecture
in Southern California.
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