Southern California is the birthplace of skateboard culture and, even
though skateparks may be found worldwide today, it is where these parks
continue to flourish as architects, engineers and skateboarders
collaborate to refine their designs. The artist Amir Zaki grew up
skateboarding, so he has an understanding of these spaces and, as
someone who has spent years photographing the built and natural
landscape of California, he has a deep appreciation of the large
concrete structures not only as sculptural forms, but also as
significant features of the contemporary landscape, belonging to a
tradition of architecture and public art.
To capture the images in this book, Zaki photographed in the
early-morning light, climbing inside the bowls and pipes while there
were no skaters around. Each photograph is a composite of dozens of
shots taken with a digital camera mounted on a motorized tripod head.
The resulting images are incredibly high resolution and can be printed
at a large scale with no loss of detail. Their look is unusual in that
Zaki's lens is somewhat telephoto, which has the effect of flattening
space, yet the angle of view is often quite wide, which exaggerates
spatial depth. The technology also allows Zaki to photograph certain
areas from difficult positions that would otherwise be impossible to
capture. Zaki makes the point that, by climbing deep inside these
spaces, the visual experience is fundamentally different from viewing
them from outside. In his text, Tony Hawk - one of world's best-known
professional skateboarders - describes how Zaki's photographs of empty
skateparks and open skies evoke memories of the idyllic freedom and the
sense of potential that he felt when he first visited a skatepark as a
child and saw skaters flying like birds in and out of the concrete pools
and bowls.
Hawk has skated in some of the parks featured in this book, and for him
several of Zaki's images, taken from the skater's perspective, recall
the experience of trying to learn a particular trick. A beautiful full
pipe that looks like a barrelling wave may be, for Hawk and other
seasoned skateboarders, a perfect example of function and form fitting
together flawlessly in a well-designed skatepark. In his essay, the Los
Angeles-based architect Peter Zellner offers a different perspective.
Skateparks are made by excavating large open areas of land within city
parks. The forms inside them may represent ocean waves, mountainous
terrain and other features from nature, but they are permanently frozen
in cement like Brutalist architecture. Every shape, line, transition,
hip, tombstone, coping, stair, flow, tile, bowl, pipe, spine, rail,
ledge, roll-in, kidney, clover, square and bank serves a specific
purpose - to provide a challenging thrill and maximum pleasure for the
rider. In this sense, skateparks epitomize function over form. In Zaki's
mesmerizing photographs, however, these concrete landscapes suggest a
more complex and integrated relationship with the history of design and
architecture in Southern California.
