The effect the Z-boys had on skate culture.

The Z-boys played a pivotal role in how skateboarding and skate culture was changed to how it is
today and they have made skating accessible for all classes in society. In skateboarding competitions
in the 1960s they had different set aspects of skateboarding that they were scored on for example
there was a completely flat wooden floor for them to perform and spins or handstands and there
was also a downhill course with cones testing skaters skill in weaving in and out of them in the
quickest time. It was largely popular by the higher class people as they had the money the
professional equipment and was easier for them to enter these competitions. The Z-boys were able
to do this due to their coach skip being the owner of a surf shop so they god boards for free. The Z-
boys shocked everyone watching their first competition as their smooth flowing surfer style and
their rebellious rough impression they gave to the other competitors and the crowd. Commentators
didn’t even know what to name the tricks they saw. They were trying new things, expressing
themselves instead of trying to a handstand for longer than their component. Skateboarding was
moulded by the Z-boys, they showed the daring rebellious side to skateboarding showing you should
get creative come up with new ways of expressing yourself through the ever changing sport which is
shown with their creative ideas of skating in empty swimming pools and abandoned water pipes. As
the Z-boys came from not much, they were from a low class in society it gave that inspiration to all
the lower class people that this sport is for anyone, anyone can try it and become good at this if you
put in the time and effort and have the courage to try daring tricks. It showed the lower classes that
the Z-boys didn’t have anything but now they got to where they were and made something of
themselves. Rock music is most commonly linked to skate culture as its fast pace recklessness goes
hand in hand with skateboarding.

The Zephyr Competition team more commonly

known as the Z-boys were a group of
skateboarders in the mid 1970’s from Santa
Monica and Venice, California. The aerial and
sliding skate moves that the Z-boys invented
were the basis for aerial skateboarding today.
Their story inspired the feature film ‘Lords of
Dogtown’ and the documentary ‘Dogtown and
the Z-boys’. Their influence on skate culture is
what made skateboarding the rock and roll,
rebellious and grungy style that it is today.

The back story of the Z-boys is that they were

originally a group of surfers who had a locals
only surf spot. Let’s just say they made sure no
one else would surf there. Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom
and Craig Steeyk opened a surf shop in 1971
called ‘Ho surfboards and Zephyr productions’.
They could surf when the want and work when
they want. In 1974, Allen Surlo, Jay Adams,
Tony Alva, Chris Cahill and Stacy Peralta joined
the surf team. Jay Adams had a massive impact on skate culture due to his crazy and spontaneous
personality but I’ll get back to him later. Once a thriving amusement park atop a pier, POP was now
abandoned, run down and nicknamed ‘Dogtown’ by the locals. With large tilted wood pilings jutting
from the water, the Cove was an incredibly dangerous place to surf but these hazardous conditions
only drove them on.

They would surf mornings when waves were highest but during the day they would hang out at the
Zephyr shop. At the time the Z-boys saw skating as a hobby, something to do after surfing. New
wheels for skateboards were made allowing them to grip onto surfaces, making skating a lot closer
to surfing and skating became a way for them to express
themselves. In 1975, the Zephyr skate team was formed
by Skip. They would skate low, riding the concrete like
they were riding a wave. Style was everything and all
inspiration was from their favourite surfers, all skaters in
the team had similar style but everyone’s was different.
In 1975 they had their debut competition. They turned up
to this competition all rowdy, pushing their way to the
front of the que in. The other skaters there were using
robotic switches, spinning on pivots and doing
handstands on the board. When it was one of the Z-boys
turn Skip switched out the music to rock n roll and the audience were shocked by the aggressive
style as it was like nothing they had seen before. That was the beginning of skate culture that we
know today.

“Jay Adams’ contribution to skateboarding defies description or category. Jay is probably not the
greatest skater of all time, but I can say without fear of being wrong that he is clearly the archetype
of modern-day skateboarding. He’s the real thing, an original seed, the original virus that infected all
of us.” – Stacy Peralta. To me, Jay Adams is the human carnation
of skate culture. His brave insanity of trying any trick no matter
how dangerous, his spontaneity as Skip Engblom said “He will be
in the middle of a manoeuvre and have the whole thing collapsing
on him and somehow at the centre of that disaster he will make
something else out of it completely which becomes art”. The Z-
boys were just trying new things for the sake of it, they weren’t
trying to land a kick flip or an ollie because they were the first,
they were creating tricks that’d never been done before, they
didn’t have names! In Lords of Dogtown you can see how jay
Adams just had the love for skating, nothing else, when the Z-
boys were starting to get recognition and people were trying to
sponsor them and make money of them, Jay Adams didn’t care,
When Tony Alva was wanting to make millions as that was the dream, Jay Adams replied we’re
already living the dream, we get to skate and surf whenever we want and don’t have to work. In
Lords of Dogtown, young boys or girls who are interested in skating get attached to Jay Adams and
his insane, rebellious, cool character. He is the human carnation of skate culture.

The music genre in Lords of Dogtown is rock. They used songs such as Half-Breed by Cher, Voodoo
Chile by Jimi Hendrix, etc. Rock songs are universal to all skate movies such as ‘The mid-90s’ and
‘Deck Dogz’ as skateboarding is fast pace, reckless and gritty. The z-Boys are what made skate
culture this was, before them it was a calm, robotic sequence of tricks and spins but the Z-boys
changed skate culture to free flowing madness and rock n roll, rebellious and creative art form to
express yourself and think of new ways of doing something and finding your own style. They are the
foundations of skateboarding today.

The idea behind Glen E Freidman’s work was not to become a famous photographer by taking
pictures of these iconic skaters, in fact he didn’t even consider himself a photographer but he just
captured images of what he thought other people would find
interesting to see as he knew he did. He was a photojournalist.
He was documenting the incredible talent of the people
skating for others to see as he got to see it first hand and felt
that others would want to see it too. He took the shots that
we know today to be iconic in skateboarding as they rode
empty pool walls as if they were waves. Glen E Freidman
wanted to document this milestone in skate culture and felt lucky to be able to see it in person.

“I never considered myself a photographer – I was trying

to share images of what I thought was interesting with
other people,” Friedman says. “I realised to get published,
I did need to take a step up. I borrowed a 35mm camera
from someone and had some good results.” – Glen E.
Friedman

The photos that Glen E Freidman and other photographers

have taken of the z-boys in Dogtown are monumentale for
skate culture but also are just intresting to see, how far
ahead of their time they were with the inovating ideas
they came up with like empty swimming pools and
abandonned water pipes, and how they were just a group of surfers who skated to past timebut as
the devolopment of skateboards happened they were the first people to try the new possibilities of
skateboarding and how there were no boundaries to the things you could do. This shows the
rebeliuous but creative culture of skateboarding that still flows through all impressive skaters today.
These photogrephers were just photojournalists taking shots of things they were already doing on a
daily bases, I regular day for the z boys and Friedman and other photographers got to see it and
thanks to them so did we.

C.R. Stecyk III was the other photojournalist of the Z-boys and was also an American artist, writer,
photojournalist, and filmmaker who has documented and influenced the surf, skate, and
snowboarding cultures. He co-wrote the book on the z-boys titled ‘Dogtown And Z-Boys’ which
documents photos of the young surf skater boys and he also co-wrote the 2001 award-winning
documentary ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’ with Stacy Peralta who is one of the main Z-boys which
documents the effect they had on skate culture. Both Stecyk and Friedman didn’t consider
themselves as photographers but more as photojournalists as they weren’t telling the skaters what
to do or where to do it but rather taking pictures of what they were doing just on a daily bases
showing their talent and they knew they were taking shots of what one day would be seen as a
monumentale time for skateboarding as they were the first to do what they did.

“Skaters by their very nature are urban guerillas: they make everyday use of the usless artifacts of
the technological burden, and employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a
thousand ways that the original architects could never dream of.” - C.R. Stecyk III
“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re
never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” - Don McCullin

Style is a major part of skating, people try find not only their own style of skating but their
own style of clothing. The most commonly used brands in skate culture are Rough beaten
up clothes from brands such as Vans, DC, Carhartt and Thrasher. In advertising for these
certain brands the photographs taken off the skaters have to be creative and eye catching
maybe an unusual obsticle to skate or a massive flight of stairs. The brand needs to be the
focus point of the shot for example if its advertising a t-shirt the troso of the person
needs to be facing the camera and as clear to the shot as possible, skate advertisers also
film videos to promote the clothing not just because the clothing is attractive to the
viewer but also they wanna be like the people in the videos making them want to
purchase the clothing more.

The two brothers from a different mother, that’s how you can explain the relationship between
music culture and skating culture. Although these two don’t share the same background, the
philosophy behind them is the same, it’s the constant struggle between individual artistic
expression, credibility and authenticity in unsupportive and rigid social environment. Everyone can
make their own style unique to them and this goes for both skating and music. Rock bands such as
nirvana have taken on this style making this grungey skate style and also hip hop bands such as the
beastie boys bringing together the two cultures.

In my recent work I have shown development in my shoots for skate culture, I have thought of many
different techniques and ways to explore every aspect of skate culture capturing its rebeliousness,
its style, its rough around the edges settings, and its uniqueness. I have used techniques such as slow
shutter speed and flash motion photography and also used different camera settings such as high iSO
to get that grainy over exposed look which also is achieved by post shot editing. I have done all types
of skate shoots whether its skate fashion shoots, action shots mid trick, studio shots with a macro
lens to show the rough nature of skateboarding. I have reseached not just photographers but
painters too for more information on settings for shoots, I have looked at work such as Rineke
Dijkstra’s work on full body portraits and cobined her work with the skater advertisments to take the
best shots I possibly can. All these techniques and processes have aloud me to make big
developments in my work on skate culture.

When it comes to their rebelious and brave attitudes, their style, and their out of the box thinking,
the z-boys had a huge effect on skate culture. They shaped the artform to what we know it to be
today. They revolutionised the sport by showing people of any class can do it and everyone who
does can have their own individul style and way of expressing themselves. The themes these boys
established in the 1970s are exactly the same today like the link between rock music and skating
showing that fast pase grittiness skateboarding is all about; being bold or couragous or possiblliy
even slightly insane. I believe skate culture would be a whole lot different if it werent for this group
of surfers who did skating to pass the time, if they hadn’t taken aspects of surfing and mixed it with
the static skateboarding style that skate culture was before the z-boys; then skateboarding today
wouldn’t be the same. I’m thankful that photographers or as Glen E. Fiedman calls himself;
photojournalists were able to document this imsportant part of skate history beceause not only did
the change the sport but they showed the world that anyone of any class can skate and that
skateboarding is an artform made to let people show their creativity.