Templates for Transition is a series of small photographs printed on aluminum that I shot at an unauthorized, skater-built (D.I.Y.) skatepark on the edge of town, as well as in my studio, where I made still lives out of the leftover building materials and ramp-forms. The work is about skateboarding and the site itself in some ways, but it’s also about the production and subversion of space, creating environments, taking matters into your own hands, manipulating materials, and discovering unrestricted forms of creativity and expression.

My initial interest in this place as subject matter for photographs was the striking contrast between the uselessness and abandonment of it as a commercial or industrial space --it was a ruin-- and how it was being used in its secondary appropriation. I focus my images on the details. The central figure in this series is a concrete embankment added by the skaters to a corner of the lot. I consider the material, formal, and conceptual qualities of this object and the gesture it represents emblematic of a sophisticated spatial practice at work: through a few minimal concrete additions and an all new vision of what could be done there, the skaters had transitioned a chunk of urban blight into a space of freedom and adventure. In these photographs I adopt the same mentality as the skaters, discarding the precepts of photographic representation the way the skaters had discarded the precepts of the urban ruin, hoping to create a new space and a new way of seeing in the process.