J. Grant Brittain INTERVIEW
What made you first want to shoot photos?
Skateboarding, I worked at a Del Mar skate ranch. I started working there in 1978 and about six months later, I borrowed my roommate’s camera and shot skateboarding..That was really the first time I ever shot photos.
Was it that you wanted to shoot photos and the first thing that you thought of was skateboarding or were you just witnessing some skateboarding that made you want to capture it?
I was looking at Skateboarder Magazine, and then just working at Del Mar every day, I’d see photographers come in and then a few months later the magazine would come out and there would be photos that they had shot there and it kind of intrigued me. I was an art major at the time. I was an artist and surfer/skater, into music, all sorts of stuff. When I shot photos and went into the dark room later on with a friend, I just went, oh my God, this is what I want to do.
What about photography was so compelling compared to drawing and painting?
Just the immediacy is what drew me in and you could go into the dark room. I think it’s the same with everybody when they go into the dark room for the first time, it’s like magic. I’d shoot photos and then go into the dark room probably the next day and see a print come up in the bath.
And that’s, there was no way to make money at it, you know, in photography either. But back then for skateboarding, it wasn’t about the money. It was just shooting my friends and realizing that I was at this place five days a week. I had these people to practice on, locals and friends, and then the amateurs and pros would come in. And as I got to know people and get a little better/
How has photography changed for you from then, until now?
I mean, everything changed. There were no computers back then so when we started doing the magazine, it was all cut and paste and you did it on art boards. If there was a mistake, for a typo you’d have to cut out one letter and you’d put wax on the back of the type and burnish it on.
It was just so hands-on and labor-intensive to do a magazine. Then that was only probably a 60 page magazine at the time. So it was a lot of people doing something they didn’t know how to do. Like, We didn’t know how to do a magazine in the beginning, we had done zines from Xerox machines and stuff like that, but it was all hands on. After that computers started and we used it for type, helped us out a bunch.
Fo you enjoy it now more the process now versus then more,
Well, it goes back to where I like it because it’s so quick. I mean again, it’s immediate and, and you can fix your mistakes, you don’t have to shoot film and blow rolls of film anymore. I was the photo editor at Transworld and I was ordering, probably a couple of hundred rolls a month of film and paying for their development of them. We were trying to shoot sequences, in skating if somebody doesn’t make a trick, you know, you don’t really run it until they make it.
So you’re just wasting all this film, like 20 rolls of film one trick.
Now it’s all about video, so I don’t have to shoot sequences anymore. If somebody asks me to shoot a sequence, I kind of laugh and I go. I haven’t shot a sequence in a couple of years.
Would you say the idea of the photo sequence is antiquated?
Yeah. It’s totally antiquated. I mean, because of Instagram and Facebook, everything is just so immediate and when somebody does a trick, it’s out within seconds and then it’s forgotten within seconds.
There’s this giant need or call for content. There’s just so much, back in the day when somebody would get a cover, a center spread or an interview. I mean, everybody remembered it for years. The magazine would come into a shop and there’d be 10 kids around one magazine that they had waited for. If a contest had happened in February, then they wouldn’t see it until probably April. Tthere were no videos, it was just a different world. Now it’s just kind of throw away content. I see stuff on Instagram, my God, that would have been a cover back in the day.
When did you start skating?
I started skating when I was 10 years old. My brother and I got skateboards for Christmas. You didn’t do tricks, you just rode around. They had clay wheels, so you’d hit a rock and go flying. I started surfing in 1970 when I was in junior high and high school. When we would skate, we were pretending like we were surfing, you’d do like a head dip under a bush or something.
In 1973, the urethane wheel came out and that’s when it started. You can actually roll over rocks, you know? In the mid seventies people startrf riding pools and building ramps and skate parks opened.
What would you say is so unique about photographing skateboarding compared to other types of subjects?
Well, it’s not even like other sports photography, because like football photography, the photographers aren’t running around, out on the field. With skating you’re in the mix, street skating especially, you go there, you’re in the environment with the skater, lots of times you’re on fisheye, so you’re right next to the person and dodging their boards.
I kind of liked the energy of it. If you don’t skate, it’s hard to shoot skating because you don’t understand it. You have to be in a certain spot and you get pretty low and you get hit now and then but it’s just part of it. I just liked the energy of it.
I’m old and it’s helped keep me young.
Just being around younger people and skaters. All my friends or people I met in the eighties pretty much at the skate park or have traveled with.
We went all over the world together and I’m still friends with all those guys, you know, like Tony Hawk and Steve Cavalero, Kevin Staab Christian Hasoi. I get to see the evolution of skateboarding, from when it was mainly in the skateparks and backyard pools in the seventies and early eighties, and then it transitioned over into street skating because all the skate parks closed.
We had to figure out how to shoot street skating. There were people, like Mark Gonzales and Natas Kaupas, and Tommy Guerrero. All these street skaters there mainly grew up in urban areas and they didn’t have skate parks. So they skated the streets of LA and San Francisco.
So we kind of had to figure it out like, how do you shoot street skating? I got to see all that evolution and the urban influence on skateboarding. Everybody can skate in the streets, you don’t need a skate park.
I never grew up with skatepark, it definitely changes your view on just like regular architecture and just like your environment, like how can I use this stuff around me and make it work?
Skaters are always looking at the environment and figuring out what to do with it. It’s street skating, so democratic. I was into skating and surfing because it was just, I could do it by myself. I wasn’t a team guy.
You didn’t need a coach or a uniform, you just needed a skateboard or a surfboard.
That’s what drew me to it. I was a little guy so I didn’t get chosen for teams, I was the last guy picked.
Definitely like a more self-fulfilling, independent activity. You don’t need, anybody else to make something happen. It’s all on your own.
It’s introspective, I can do it anytime. You can skate any time. You can draw any time. You can shoot photos anytime, you know?
Do you shoot anything other than skateboarding? What other styles of photography are you into?
I mean, skateboarding is my livelihood. That’s what I’ve made my living on for the last, 42 years But I do my own fine art photography. I didn’t take any photography classes for the first year and a half, probably. So I was kind of just wasting film. Couldn’t figure out how cameras worked.
It didn’t know about f-stops and shutter speeds. My only instruction was to have the sun to your back. This was before you could shoot flash during the day and sun at your back and matched the exposure needle. That and focusing the camera, that’s all I knew how to do. Then my roommate told me to shoot at a 500th of a second, and that will stop the action. So that’s all I knew how to do.
My friend Sonny Miller, who was a photographer and a cinematographer. I was going to school and I was taking art there in general ed. Then he goes, Hey, you want to go in the dark room and print one of your pictures? That’s when I went into the dark room with him and I printed a picture, I just got jazzed on photography. Before then I was wallowing in the mud, pretty much trying to figure it out. So the next week I changed all my art classes to photography classes, I took three photography classes.
Then I took a photo history class and that’s when I got turned on to all the masters. I started discovering like other people’s styles that lived a hundred years before or 20 years before. And just kind of adapted that into my own style, really got hooked on history and reading books. I still had no money. So I was borrowing photo books from people and going into the library and looking at photo books.
I had one really great teacher, and I had him for all three of the classes. Then he kind of became my mentor and started hanging out with him and he just started turning me on to all these great photographers. I started to learn dark room techniques and how light works with film, about shadow and about exposure. Pre-visualization and thinking about the image before you take it. Taking the photo a certain way and then going into the dark room and developing it a certain way and printing the photo a certain way to get a certain look that you want.
The photo classes came in handy with developing everything, but then helping to start Transworld world in 1983, I started to get free film.
We had an art director, David Carson, working side by side with an art director who kind of knew what they were doing. I started shooting photos, graphically, for a magazine. Things like you don’t want to have stuff right in the middle of the frame and cause of gutters, you know, you don’t want to wire going through someone’s face and, and just working on articles before we even shot them. I think I shoot pretty graphically, even if you look at my, fine art stuff, my abstracts, or portraits.
I started shooting a certain way to work with magazines and it was just experimentation. Then I started teaching younger photographers coming up, teaching my assistants, everything I knew, just trying to share. Because I didn’t want to do all the work. I’m trying to train people to do my job, but not too well because I don’t want to get fired.
You don’t live forever and you got to share.
Learning from somebody is such a difference than trying to take on the challenge of teaching yourself something new.
It really helps. Even taking classes, that’s a shortcut, learning it by yourself can be so hard. And I’m kind of, I like to be shown something like several times, and then I kind of get it. Now you can learn how to do anything on YouTube. It’s amazing what you can learn online. You don’t really need to go to school for it. I mean, school’s good. You might find, this mentor that will share everything that they’ve ever learned. It teaches you how to work under someone. I still take workshops from people I look up to. I just got back from Santa Fe and did the Santa Fe photographic workshops with this guy, Keith Carter.
It’s probably better that even after decades of shooting, you don’t think you know it all yet.
I was going to say, I don’t know everything.
Who were some of those artists that you discovered in school that kind of had a lasting impact on you?
I remember seeing Walker Evans’ work for the first time, all the stuff he did during The Depression. Henry Cartier, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, the Bauhaus and Man Ray, and people like that.
