J. Grant Brittain started out casually taking photos of friends skateboarding at the skatepark where he worked in the late 1970s — on a borrowed camera, no less. It seemed like the thing to do. No grand plans beyond taking pictures of his friends. Brittain would parlay that into a long career serving as photo editor at Transworld magazine — every bit as seminal as Thrasher in terms of covering the skateboarding world. Brittain's gigantic archive includes kinetic action shots of legends like Steve Caballero, Rodney Mullen, Natas Kaupas and literally documents the growth of one Tony Hawk from a pre-teen to full flight redefining the game a few years later.
It's been a long and very strange trip for Brittain, from Del Mar Skate Ranch to Orlando Museum of Art, where his first museum photo exhibition, Push, just premiered. (How'd it come together? "I got asked," said a still somewhat surprised Brittain during a standing-room only lecture days after his show's opening.)
Paired with the similarly combustible punk retrospective Torn Apart, these two exhibitions, coming on the heels of the recent and excellent Florida Prize group show, demonstrate that new chief curator Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon is not here to fuck around. Push satisfyingly pushes at the limits of adventure for the museum.
Shot entirely on film, Brittain's work is still every bit as fresh and breathtaking as when it graced the pages of Transworld in the 1980s, sparking a visual revolution in covering the skate world.
Push occupies one gallery in the museum, lining four walls with a riot of skating imagery — portraits, unreal action shots, color images, black-and-whites, moments captured that verge on surreal abstraction, differently sized images all pieced together like a manic puzzle.
And in the center of the room, on a raised platform and under glass, is Brittain's first camera, surrounded by a clutter of contact sheets and his NSA membership card (that's National Skateboarding Association, by the way). His photo on that card, incidentally, is one of two photos of Brittain in Push. The other shows him bandaged up after he got smacked in the face with a skateboard trying to get the perfect action shot. This line of work demands total commitment, y'see.
The highlights are many: Christian Hosoi seemingly rocketing into infinity against an early evening sky; a group shot of the Bones Brigade from the mid-'80s looking like a (more) mischievous Devo; Lester Kasai, bound in ropes and fabric as a tongue-in-cheek "Homage to Christo"; Stacy Peralta heading straight for the camera, a panicked hand reaching into the frame to blunt the impact, a restaurant worker looking on bemusedly; Natas Kaupas doing an unreal curb plant. Most of Brittain's action photos, shot up-close and personal, have a residual crackle of electricity emanating from them still.
Meanwhile, "The Push," featuring Todd Swank; a portrait of Sinisa Egelja with a broken skateboard hovering ghostlike over his face; and an impressionistic "Rodney Mullen, Silhouette," capturing Mullen's shadow cast while balancing on the tip of his board, are unintentional through-lines to the moody aesthetics of Joy Division and Factory Records, featured one gallery over at Torn Apart. "It's all about the shadows," says Brittain. "I love shadows."
Brittain's portraits, on the other hand, have an air of innocence and are like a beatific calm amidst a storm of ollies and pool-shredding. It's easy to forget how young these athletes were at the time, but unguarded and almost-vulnerable shots of Natas Kaupas sporting a Public Enemy tee and a very young Tony Hawk are an amazing contrast to, say, the picture of Lance Mountain riding a flaming skateboard.
Ah, yes, the flaming skateboard. Shot in vivid color, "Lance Mountain, On Fire, North Lake Tahoe, CA, 1985" is the very document of daredevil punk. Mountain set his board alight right before skating the massive California ramp in front of a large audience. As Brittain recalls, mission accomplished, Mountain then threw his flaming board into the crowd.
We can't end this without touching on the iconic Burdine's shoot in 1983. Brittain and a group of skaters converged on the Fashion Square Mall for a late-night guerrilla skate session. The ad-hoc ramps would be the contour-tiled walls at the entrance to the department store; in between frenzied bursts of skating — Brittain snapping away — they'd hide in the bushes to evade security doing the rounds. The two featured shots of Billy Ruff and Neil Blender are stunning, and the re-creation of the tile runway as a display piece is a satisfying way to add a local connection to this retrospective.
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