The Book
I told myself: let’s meet and photograph all the key figures that shaped modern skateboarding and influenced our generation.
I was eager to publish a book of portraits with no action photos. I wanted to capture the key figures of the scene, in their everyday environment. But I wanted the real thing.
Many books have been published since but none has been able to resist the temptation of including action shots. And that was exactly what I wanted to avoid.
The idea was to put together the first monograph of portraits with the street as the background. I wanted to show the man behind the tricks, the person behind the style.
No Skateboarding’s description
No Skateboarding is a photography book putting together a gallery of portraits of the 70 most influential skaters in the history of the sport. But instead of having action shots of the riders’ feats, it pays tribute to them by making portraits of the men behind the sometimes legendary tricks they once pulled. Rather in the artistic tradition of grand portraiture as it was carried out by painters from Van Dyck to Jean-Baptiste Ingres and later by photographers from Nadar to Annie Leibovitz, the book is composed of a series of posed portraits shot on a traditional square format camera over a period of fifteen years. But this is tradition with a twist, and the setting for those portraits is not the photographer’s studio or an elaborate set but the men’s immediate environment: the street.
No Skateboarding’s specifications
No skateboarding / Author Mathias Fennetaux / Foreword J.G Brittain / ISBN 978 2 746 622 890 / Hardcover / sewn and glued binding / Flat spine / 29x31cm / Published by Mathias Fennetaux / Text in English / 70 images / 22 duotones and 48 couleurs / 160 pages / printed in Italy / Total print run 1000 copies /
Available on Amazon Europe et USA
Openning at Colette, Paris June 6 2011, Exhibition from 6 June to 3 August 2011, book signing June 16, 2011
The first edition of No Skateboarding is limited to 1000 copies
- Limited Edition of 100 copies each numbered coming in a clamshell box with a traditional 24x30cm Black&White print on Baryté paper, signed by the author.
