Portfolio Review: Phil Jackson's Gritty Skate Photography

Traveling skateboarder Phil Jackson documents youth subculture with a distinct eye for formal composition. He captures raw, gritty scenes pulling the most out of his subjects. From the camps of Woodward to the parks of Philadelphia, Jackson covers the breadth of skating in its purest form.

In 2008, Jackson received his BFA in Photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Jackson is an active member of the Film Por Vida Print Exchange Program and served as Photo Editor of the recent book FDR Skatepark: A Visual History. He shares with us some of his favorite snaps from his trips around the country.

For more visit Jackson's blog.

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"Jamie with black eye and knife wounds. This was taken after an especially violent 4th of July party at FDR. The Magic Hour, my favorite time to shoot. Another example of wounds at dusk, that push and pull, a beautiful image of something awful. This is my Nan Goldin shot."

"This is from one of my first rolls of color film ever, but it is one of the few photos I would call classic. I think this works so well precisely because I’m so far away from the action. You see that black, billowing smoke and you know that something’s burning that shouldn’t be. The look on the kid’s face sums it up. A print of this was purchased by the West Collection, too."

"My friend Jersey Drew is a big Mets fan and has taken to bringing a wiffle ball bat on the road wherever we go. This is an impromptu pickup game in Westerly, Rhode Island. I’m drawn to the green wash of fluorescent street lamps mixing with the flash and the car lights behind him in the distance. And the winding up pose of throwing a pitch is such a classic gesture. I gave up every team sport I ever played once I got into skateboarding, but I’ve always liked the way Raymond Pettibon talked about baseball in his drawings. So I was thinking about him and those drawings with this photo."

"A bunch of my friends live in post-industrial Newark, NJ in a warehouse space above a refrigerator repair shop. It’s a rough neighborhood, sort of a Wild West / anything goes vibe. Here my friend John reaches for a feral cat in the middle of a barbecue. The triangle formed between his body and the cat, guided along with the junk-filled El Camino in the back, and all while holding the tin-foiled corn."

"I worked at Camp Woodward for several years --- first as a counselor, then as a director of the skateboard program. If you’ve never heard of a product toss, basically it involves pro skateboarders hurling free stuff at their fans immediately following a demo. The kids go crazy and pile over each other for stickers, t-shirts, and the like. I shot an entire roll of this product toss trying to get it just right. The sun poking through from behind the one kid, the tongue, everyone’s expressions, and the framing. Some people have asked me if this was staged, and of course it is not, but I don’t think it would even be possible to fake this."

"Another photo from Camp Woodward, actually taken only a few feet away from the Product Toss we saw earlier. And this was several years later. I like the push and pull between the guy’s beautiful locks of hair, the sunset, and the bright red stigmata wound, wet from the homemade duct tape bandage. As a rule, I don’t have people posing in my photos, but you have to break your own rules sometimes too."

"This is the band The Trowels playing the 4th of July party at FDR Skatepark a few years back. Most of the time, bands play off in the parking lot, but this day they were playing 5 feet from the edge of the bowl. So there was a kind of energy, both activities feeding off of each other, that was really rad. And then there’s the dirt pile that people are dancing in, the dust cloud, and FDR favorite Lauren going crazy with her dress held on by a thread. She can skate, build and drink with the best of them."

"Davis putting on a shirt in our old apartment in Tempe, Arizona. It’s such a weird moment, pose, composition…there’s so little to make sense of. And that all comes through despite being a photo of such a normal, boring act. This photo was kind of a breakthrough for me because I really want to make more work that looks like this…but it’s really hard."

"I’ve always said that this photo is 'like an archaeological dig, only in reverse.' My friends are pouring concrete onto a Jersey barrier down by the Delaware river in Philadelphia. They have shovels, masks, headlamps, and other tools. But it’s nighttime, not daylight, and they’re building up, not digging down. Sooner or later, someone will find this and wonder how it got there."

"This is Davis sleeping in a ditch on the side of Highway 99 outside Fresno, California. Those are train tracks on the other side of the fence and we heard the trains all night. We then woke up and skated some abandoned pools. I like the way the triangular composition works with the secondary color scheme of orange, purple and green."

"Fence hopping is a part of skateboarding and something that you become accustomed to right from the start. Whether it’s an abandoned building, a closed down hotel, or a schoolyard on the weekend, it seems like we are constantly trespassing, although always with good intentions. I rarely use silhouetted imagery in my work, but with the sun perfectly behind his body, I think it works well in this photo. And there is something really classic about that pose. When shooting, I try to avoid things that can date the image (cell phones, for example). And in doing so, I can makes things look timeless (or try to, at least)."

"My girlfriend dancing in our old apartment in South Philadelphia. I think we were just joking around as I shot photos of her dancing, but there’s something really mysterious about this pose and the look on her face that I happened to catch. And I find myself often trying to reproduce this look when I shoot indoors, shooting at slow shutter speeds and hiding glowing lamps behind people."

"My friend Shiner stretching his back out at a skatepark in New Haven, Connecticut. I’m really interested in the shapes that the human body can make, often in relation to architecture. Skateboarding is usually a reinterpretation of public space, but here, ironically, the skateboard park is being reinterpreted for something totally pedestrian."

"This is a kegstand at a ramp in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Sometimes I worry that people who don’t know me might think that my work glorifies the use of alcohol, drugs etc. And while I do portray those things as I am around them quite a bit, I try to be a neutral party, an observer. I’ve never drank or smoked anything in my life, so I think I do have an outsider’s perspective on the whole scenario, and can look at it from a more anthropological view, as seen here, the kegstand as a ritual. The actual act of drinking beer upside down from a keg isn’t even shown, you can’t see his face, it’s obscured. It’s about the people, the party, the shape of the body, and the arrangement of the whole scene."

"4th of July at FDR Skatepark. Alcohol poisoning, laying in rubble, crust punk mom watching over. This kid’s name is Lewis and exactly 1 year later he was in this same situation. A lot of people have brought up this photo’s similarity with Jeff Wall’s “Dead Troops Talk”, which I remember seeing on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a kid."