concrete content
A young man is airborne on skateboard above the cement curl of a graffiti covered rink in Brooklyn, New York City. The man is Bobby Puleo (2001). The twin towers of The World Trade Centre form a backdrop to this scene. The evening sky and smog is fading over the city. There is a disturbing subtext to this image by Mike O'Meally lkarus who, in making wings for himself, flies too close to the sun, damaging his wings and falling to his death. The lurid sky and backdrop is de-realised like Richard Prince's sunset images, selected and re-photographed from magazines and advertisements. This photograph is characteristic of many of the images in Concrete Content. As subjects of photography, professional and amateur skateboarders express the possibilities of the picturesque. The lateral extensions of skateboarders on concrete and plywood ramps reveal the capacities of sites and bodies in a kind of parallax which magnifies their variety and singularity. The photographic images by Mike O'Meally and Max Creasy present skateboarding as a global cultural phenomenon of hegemony and difference with images from the United States of America, Sweden, Australia and Brazil. The photographers utilise conventions of fashion photography and documentary photography. The culture of skateboarding has utilised photography, video and digital technologies (commercial and 'do-it yourself practices) to transform a marginal subcultural space into a mass market with special interest magazines, clothing, sneakers, boards and major events. Skateboarding has its own photographic conventions based upon fragmentation, repetition, action and performance. In the culture of skateboarding photographic practices become predatory in that they plunder cultures and spaces for the mass market in a way related to tourism's quest for the natural and authentic. O'Meally