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#Ontour twitter series

#Ontour twitter full

The photographs, many with lovingly handwritten captions, depict the intimacy and aimlessness of touring life: a van full of young people who feel as if they know everything important about one another, all of them always looking for something fun to do, and often finding it. “I know I snapped it-it’s gone, it’s broke,” he said.) His new book of photographs, “ Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed,” published by Aperture, re-creates the years from 1995 to 2012, when he was skating and shooting obsessively. (Video cameras captured the fall, and Templeton’s gritted-teeth reaction as fellow-skaters gathered around him.

Templeton has never really stopped skateboarding, but he more or less retired in 2012, at the age of forty, after breaking his right tibia and fibula. “But I got maybe deformed in a better way.” He grew up in Huntington Beach, California, with a mother whose life had been changed by childhood brain damage, and two grandparents who were in no position to exercise much control over a rangy teen-ager who didn’t want to do much of anything besides skate. “A lot of people I know had a fucked-up family, you know-and it deforms you,” Templeton says, in the film.

(The brand’s official name is Toy Machine Bloodsucking Skateboard Company.) When he wasn’t skating, Templeton was often painting, and even when he was skating he was taking photographs soon he fell in with a cohort of like-minded skater-artists, including the director Mike Mills, who in 2000 made Templeton the star of one of his first films, “Deformer,” a short documentary. He was at least a few years older than everyone else, and he was also sober and married-an anomaly even within his own tight-knit group.įor Templeton, one of the upsides of being the owner was that he could put whatever he liked on the boards: Toy Machine became known for decks emblazoned with cartoonish monsters and ads full of sardonic corporate-speak. “That would pay for hotels and gas to get to the next stop.” Often, Templeton was not just skating but also driving the van, and acting as de-facto tour manager. “The shop might pay us eight hundred dollars, or a thousand dollars, for the demo,” he told me. The itinerary was determined by the location of skateboard shops, which hosted get-togethers where Templeton and his friends showed fans what they could do.

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The process was pretty simple and pretty gruelling: he signed up some of his fellow-skaters as endorsers, got some boards printed up, and then embarked on an endless series of cross-country promotional tours.

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He became a professional skateboarder in 1990, just before the end of his senior year in high school, and a few years later he started his own skateboard company, Toy Machine. Ed Templeton has spent a big chunk of his life as a travelling salesman.