Intro 123
Images for emulation

'[Skateboard magazines] are an implicated part of the development of skateboarding, and are thus what historians call a primary source - unmediated by the distance of time and backward look of the historian.'

'[They are not] the products of professional journalists, but the products of skateboarders themselves who have become journalists through working on such publications. Their agenda is not then the external agenda of the intellectual academic or careerist reporter, but the internal agenda of the intellectually active proponent.'

'Skateboard magazines are highly illustrated with still and high-speed sequence photography. As such, this imagery as much as the written work provides "the nearest thing that we have to a historical record of what skateboarding is".'

'The photograph in fact has a triple value for this history of skateboarding. Most obviously, it provides a window on the past, showing what went on and where. Second, the photograph is itself an implicated part of skateboarding. Third, the photographs reproduced here perform part of the argument of the book - the images, then, are not so much just representations of what happened but have approximately equal status to the words.'

'The performative nature of skateboarding's consciousness [i.e. it ultimately means something when the skateboarder skateboards] means that the image of skateboarding acquires the status of a statement - it is not only a representation of a thing, the meaning of which is clarified through text, but is a representation of an enunciative act and hence carries meaning in a less mediated manner.'

Iain Borden, 'Skateboarding, Space and the City'

"Photograph everything...every aspect of anything to do with your friends on and off skateboards. Time goes by quicker than you think, take the pictures now."

Filmmaker/photographer Larry Clark to apprentice skateboard photographer Tobin Yelland

When I began taking pictures of alternative worship events, my motivation was simply to record some amazing but short-lived artworks, so that now and in the future people could see what this thing was all about. Over time a more subtle inner agenda emerged, out of who I am and the kind of photography I see most of. These images represent how an 'intellectually active proponent' sees the scene he is a part of.

They were intended for emulation, for the dissemination of 'tricks', recording not just facts but possibilities. They are a contribution to a discourse about Christianity and society pursued not only with words, but with images and 'enunciative acts'. Alternative worship too has a 'global conversation', in which ideas and moves are passed between groups, adapting and extending as they go. Photographs play an active part in that process, by documenting the adaptations and innovations and provoking new ones.

They also help create something that can be identified with, for people who thought they were alone or isolated in how they felt about church. I used to be in that position myself, it would have helped to have found a 'Small Fire' back then. Photographs, as in board sports, can be a beacon for those who search.

There is no really satisfactory term for the cultural field around skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing, which encompasses an entire web of activities and attitudes sharing the same 'head-space'. It's instructive to compare this culture with church. In the former, image-making, action & theory go hand-in-hand as simultaneous activities. Actions and images embody theoretical research. Theory often emerges out of instinctive action. Knowledge is constructed through images and actions as much as words.

Conversely, the prevailing culture of the Church is an academic culture dealing in conceptual research, written theory which then seeks forms. The ethos is to write and approve first, then act to reproduce the writings. The culture-makers are primarily those whose writings have been tested, whose training has been approved before they can act.

The difference between the cultures resembles the divide explored by musicologist Simon Frith, between the Classical tradition of music as conceptual, existing as a written work before and above any performance, and the African tradition of music as a social ritual constructive of social space, a performance constructing and responsive to its context. In the latter tradition, the performance that is right is the one that is right for [and in dialogue with] this group of people right now rather than the one that is closest to a theoretical ideal.

It's striking how many of those involved in church experiments are connected to or participants in the culture of riding sideways. I had assumed this fact to be banal, since board-riding culture in a diluted form is so pervasive now; but the reactions I've had when the subject crops up suggest that it's not as boringly self-evident as I had supposed.

Is it because creative and free-thinking people are drawn to that culture, or because that culture produces creative and free-thinking people? Is it because they seek a kind of church where doing and thinking are one inseparable gesture - thoughtful doing, active thinking, a cultivation of 'intelligent instinct'?