Ed Templeton: The Skateboarder Who Kept a Camera Running

In a photograph from 1997, the skateboarder Elissa Steamer stands in Laconia, New Hampshire. In another from 2007, Russian police arrest the skater Josh Harmony in St. Petersburg. Both pictures were taken by Ed Templeton, who spent more than two decades as a professional skateboarder and carried a camera through most of them. They belong to a body of work that has since filled museum galleries in Ghent, Maastricht and Long Beach and at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and that made Templeton one of the few figures equally known in skate shops and photography museums.

From the board to the darkroom

Templeton was born in Garden Grove, California, in 1972. According to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, he skated professionally from 1990 to 2012. In 1994 he founded Toy Machine Bloodsucking Skateboard Co., and in the same year began taking photographs, prompted by the work of Larry Clark, whose Tulsa series dates from 1971.

The other constant in his life arrived earlier. He met the photographer Deanna Templeton, born in Huntington Beach in 1969, at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in 1987, and they married four years later. The couple still live in Huntington Beach, where each has a home studio and they share a darkroom. They are teetotal vegans, and the gallery’s wall text notes that they use no alcohol, no drugs and no animal products, a detail that sits oddly and productively beside Ed’s long run of pictures of teenagers smoking and kissing.

The skateboarding world took its own measure of him in 2016. At the Skateboarding Hall of Fame ceremony on May 13 of that year, held at the City National Grove of Anaheim, Templeton was inducted in the 1990s category. Juice Magazine reported that he used his speech to look back on a 22-year professional career and on founding Toy Machine, insisting that the honour belonged to what had been built as a team. He described skateboarding as “this beautiful microcosmic world” and said it had stood in for his parents.

Photography as a diary

Templeton’s photographs are close to a diary, and the diary is crowded. He photographs his wife, his friends, other skaters, his family and the young people he met on the road. The press release for his 2010 survey at S.M.A.K. in Ghent described a practice that records sexuality, fear, aggression, joy and trouble without passing judgement on any of it, and that moves past autobiography to describe a wider social world.

That survey, The Cemetery of Reason, ran at the Ghent museum from April 3 to June 13, 2010. Curated by Thomas Caron, it gathered more than 1,200 works, photographs alongside paintings and sculptures, in dense clusters. It came with the first institutional monograph on his work, with essays by Caron, Jean-François Chevrier, Carlo McCormick, Arty Nelson and Philippe Van Cauteren.

The paintings and objects matter to the photographs. Templeton often paints backgrounds onto his photographs or adds text, which pushes the subject forward and turns a snapshot into something closer to a page from a notebook. His books follow the same logic. The Art Gallery of Western Australia calls book and zine making central to both Templetons’ practice and lists among Ed’s best known titles Teenage Smokers and Wires Crossed, as well as Contemporary Suburbium, made with Deanna in 2017. The couple also appeared in Aaron Rose’s Beautiful Losers project, which ran as an exhibition, a book and a film, and were the subject of Mike Mills’s 2000 short film Deformer.

Wires Crossed

The fullest account of the skate years is Wires Crossed. The Bonnefanten in Maastricht presented it from April 15 to September 17, 2023, with Templeton himself curating alongside Celien Govaerts and Roxy Jongewaard. It covers the period from 1995 to around 2012, photographed on a 35mm camera as he toured America with other professionals. The museum summarised the subject as life at the boundary between adolescence and adulthood: broken bones, boredom, arguments and sex. Aperture published the accompanying book.

The show travelled to the Long Beach Museum of Art, where it ran from February 2 to May 5, 2024, under the title Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995 to 2012. The Long Beach Current reported that it was his first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The Long Beach version included pictures of Mark Gonzales, Lance Mountain, Andrew Reynolds and Elissa Steamer, alongside memorabilia Templeton had kept from his career, and each room carried excerpts from his own writing on skate culture. He was closely involved in designing the layout.

That a skater’s tour photographs reached a museum is less surprising than how long it took for an American museum to give them a solo show. European institutions had been there first, and the body of pictures Templeton built was by then nearly three decades deep.

Home ground

Huntington Beach is the other great subject. In Death Metal Summer, a joint exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Ed and Deanna showed 142 works made between 1995 and 2022, many of them taken near their own front door. The checklist is a map of a working life: a Teenage Smoker photographed in Huntington Beach in 1996 and another in Helsinki in 1999; Teenage Kissers pictures from Boulder in 1997, Birmingham in 2007 and Huntington Beach in 2013; a self-portrait with a bloody hand from 1997; and a photograph of Deanna with Ed in hospital in Fountain Valley, California, in 1998.

The couple’s photographs share wall space but not a single author. Deanna’s side of the checklist runs heavily to portraits of young women in Huntington Beach, named by first name: Andrea, Tina, Kristen, Morgan. Ed’s side moves between the hometown and the tour stops. Placed together, they describe the same town from two angles, which is a reminder that the beach suburb at the end of the American West is also a place where people grow up, get hurt, fall in love and leave.

Templeton’s work is now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Much of the work behind it was made by someone who, at the time, was meant to be skating.