5"-&4 '30. THE
GUTTER
²*¾. 13&55: 463& * $65 0'' )*4 )&"% ³ ANDREW NORTON
Sure, as an in-demand professional skate photographer you regularly get to travel as well as witness and document top-shelf shralping. However, alongside the satisfaction of successful urban spot exploration at home and abroad comes the numerous unsavoury obstacles photographers sometimes face. Here you’ll find police, jail, a potentially blown banger, depression-invoking gear loss, and a scene straight out of The Warriors as a few examples of the darker times spent in the name of capturing those coveted images we get to enjoy in comfort.
“Back around 2003, a bunch of us were shooting at the indoor 10-stair down in the NYC subway system. A cop came and tried to give me a ticket for obstructing the stairway or something, but in order to give a ticket he had to run my name in the system. Turned out I had an outstanding bench warrant from when I was 16 years old for skating Astor Place in Manhattan. Of course I never served that. How would I get to court at 9am on a school day when I was living 45 minutes away in the suburbs? Anyways, I figured it’d go away, but it didn’t, so I was taken to jail for the night. I was there for 20 hours and almost didn’t get out before the end of the next day. Jail in New York is gross, I’ll never go back.� —ALLEN YING
“One time, around 1999, I forgot my photo bag at Peace Park in Montreal only to realize it 45 minutes later when I was already at home. Not having any insurance at the time, I drove back to Peace Park faster than an emergency vehicle. Everyone was gone as well as my bag, and at that moment it was as if I had just lost two years of my life. Driving back home I was feeling kind of suicidal, but when I entered my apartment the light on my answering machine was blinking. It was my buddy Frenchie saying, ‘Yo, Mon Oncle. You are fucking retarded. I have your photo bag. Call me.’� —DAN MATHIEU
“During a trip to Spain in 2006 I was jumped in a subway station. Five guys attempted to steal my camera equipment, so I put all the gear behind me and started swiggin’ my arms like a raging tornado. All those idiots got were some black eyes and possibly a missing Adam’s apple [laughs]. Don’t ever mess with my camera equipment‌â€? —JAY BRIDGES
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CONCRETE SKATEBOARDING
SASCHA DALEY - KICKFLIP
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* 8"4 0/ 5)*4 5"*8"/ 53*1 */ ´ with Sascha Daley and Ryan Oughton, and it was two weeks of extreme heat and demos. We scoped out a doubleset in Taipei earlier on, and eventually went back on one of the last days since Sascha was down to try and skate it. For whatever reason, I thought it would look good to shoot the massive double fisheye and on film with my medium-format camera. He landed a kickflip after about three tries and I’m giving him high-fives, but in the back of my head I’m thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure I cut off his head in this photo. Do I tell him now and burst his bubble pretty hard or do I wait to see if the photo turned out first?’ I hedged my bets and convinced him to do it one more time, which was probably the last thing he wanted to hear. Sascha kindly bit his tongue while I wisely chose to go digital and long lens. We got a good photo for an RDS ad, but the stinger was with the video clip, which was Sascha’s last trick in his Strange Brew part. You can see my giant body sprawled out on the stairs shooting the fisheye photo that I blew it on [laughs]. —ANDREW NORTON
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