Like other types of sport documentation that appeal to a particular fan-based audience, skate photography and its photographers have largely been committed to athletic aerialists, knucklehead lifestyle party shots and the obligatory bone-breaking wipeouts. Skate photographer Mike Blabac, whose deftly crafted oeuvre is featured in a new career-spanning volume of his work, Blabac Photo (powerHouse Books), is one of those wonderful exceptions to the rule. The kind of exception we call, for lack of a better word, an artist. Since getting his first camera at 13 years old, just as he was getting into skateboarding himself, Blabac has been blessed by exceptional opportunities to work with a number of skateboarding's more innovative and beloved pros, but also, he has always simply treasured the sport's raw energy on the streets.
"A bunch of kids who aren't famous sneaking around a building and climbing over a fence to get to their spot can mean a lot more to me than the well-lit, commissioned work I do," he says. For whatever elements of chance that may go into getting the best shots, Blabac insists that, "knowing how tricks are meant to look and the best angle to capture the gnarliest moments—as a skateboarder, you completely understand it. Where even a great photographer who doesn't get it, never would." A rare combination of lifelong rider and consummate lensman, Blabac distills the essence of skateboarding down to a personality-driven, simplified portraiture that owes as much to Richard Avedon as it does to all those "local dudes around the country who work at the Home Depot, for whom skating is their life."
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