I started writing about the events that lead up to this interview from ONE Magazine in 2008, but in the middle of reminiscing I realized I was mixing up two different stories into one. So instead of that, I'll just talk a little about the photos that are involved in this article.
For starters, I was fortunate enough to have my good friend of many years, Billy O'Neill, write up a few paragraphs about me for this. It was an honor having someone who knew me as well as he did to be able to say a few words.
A friend of mine, Tim Parker, from the UK shot this portrait of me in Times Square. I wanted something that felt really New York and he wanted to shoot a photo that represented the city well as long as it had a blurry yellow taxi in it.
A couple of times a year I used to make it a point to take a trip up to Connecticut to skate with my friend Brendan and explore all of his amazing hidden spots. This was in a town that was pretty run down so it had a lot of gritty/grimy spots that photographed well. I tried to pick the least common grab to air from this rough bank over a sketchy pole jam.
This first photo has a funny post story. The photo turned out well, but I found the kids on the right a little distracting. Brandon Smith shot this photo and sent it to me to photoshop the girl in the pink dress. I don't want to sound like a dick but I found her rather large pink dress a bit distracting, so I had to minimize it as much as possible. (that was a polite way to put it, right?)
The cold weather was approaching fast and I was running out of time to get last minute clips for my Truth section. I needed a gap of some sort since I felt my section was lacking that and found this set of stairs in the back of a newly redesigned school in Staten Island. It worked as a good photos and ended up being my ender clip in The Truth.
I felt so bad that Brandon had to skate around the city with his bag of camera gear, lenses, flashes and light stands. We couldn't do much exploring since I didn't want to waste time skating around for no reason. We thought this random ledge in a narrow alley looked cool so we took a break for this photo in Manhattan.