Templeton has never really stopped skateboarding, but he more or less retired in 2012, at the age of forty, after breaking his right tibia and fibula. (Video cameras captured the fall, and Templeton’s gritted-teeth reaction as fellow-skaters gathered around him. “I know I snapped it—it’s gone, it’s broke,” he said.) His new book of photographs, “Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed,” published by Aperture, re-creates the years from 1995 to 2012, when he was skating and shooting obsessively. The photographs, many with lovingly handwritten captions, depict the intimacy and aimlessness of touring life: a van full of young people who feel as if they know everything important about one another, all of them always looking for something fun to do, and often finding it. Sources of entertainment include roadkill, swimming holes, pornographic magazines, feckless security guards, and a quantity of alcohol that would seem quite incompatible with riding a wooden board attached to four little wheels. Often, the joy and business of skateboarding itself is somewhere just out of frame. On one page, beneath a photograph of the pro skater Nate Broussard looking exhausted, Templeton adds an explanation. “The pressure on skaters to perform is immense,” he writes. “Some days no matter how hard you try, your body physically gives up, your brain melts, and you end up lying bloody on the asphalt in tears and defeat.” This comes near the end, and it colors all the other pictures in the book, making it possible to see the hard work that enables—and, perhaps, necessitates—all this goofing around.
