The first ever skatepark I went to was in the early 80s and it was on Strawberry Road in my home town of Retford in Nottinghamshire. It was next to a pig slaughter house. The skatepark was not very good and had been built at the tail end of the 70s, no doubt after much local council debate and whose eventual completion coincided perfectly with the death of the first skateboarding craze in the UK. Many more years of riding my bmx in skateparks and photographing for skateboard and bmx magazines followed, but I eventually gave it all up and looked to other places for both my enjoyment and income. However, in 2003 I started spending time in skateparks again: only now with no tricks to try and no assignments to deliver. For the first time I found myself begining to look at the whole space and all the people there, not just the ones doing the best tricks.

At the bottom of the page is a review of these pictures by Iain Borden, Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture.

Review by Iain Borden

At first viewing, James Hudson’s photographs of skateboarding seem to be as much about the peripheral spaces and moments of skateboard and bmx parks as they are about the acts of skateboarding and bmx riding themselves. Sure, there are some great aerials, carves, stalls and other tricks on view here, but they are mostly consigned to the background or edge of the frame.

Instead, skateboarding and bmx appear through a whole series of other devices. Action, such as it is depicted, is often reduced to a sense of anticipation, with riders waiting to drop in or simply standing on a board. Or it is visible through the implication of an act that has already taken place: a skater lies prone and board-less at the bottom of a bowl, blood trickles down a skater’s arm, or the rear window of a car is seen smashed by an errant board. And in some images the rider’s presence is withdrawn almost entirely, and made apparent only through the pervasive extension of the length of a board, or through a shadow stretching out into the bowl.

Above all, however, it is the other stuff that emerges in these photographs: not the pure dynamism of a skateboarder on a ramp or a bmx rider on a wall, but the everyday, occasional and accidental stuff that just goes on at skateparks every minute and every hour of the day. So we see young kids at Area 51 in Goteborg messing around in the bottom of a ramp, or a shirtless rider at Canteloes arguing with just-off-frame skaters. We also see other people seemingly unaware of what is going on just around the corner or over their shoulder: a man at Drammen who is turned away from a vertical bmx-er to the left of the image, a spikey haired man at Ripley apparently uninterested in a bmx aerial just away to his right, or a whole group of kids determinedly not watching a skateboard aerial on the large ramp at St Neots.

Hudson’s images are, then, the very antipathy of much skateboard and other sports related imagery, where the actual activity is usual rendered into a hugely dynamic but very often context-less performance. Here, however, the performance is still present, but not made central, not made into a heroic single figure. The most beguiling of these photographs for me are, therefore, those in which a veritable polyphony of actions are taking place. At one image at Canteloes, people sit and look in all manner of different directions, while one skater (holding a shopping bag) prepares to drop in to a shallow bowl. At Malmo, some stare expectantly at a skater perched on a steep ledge, but just as many others are looking determinedly elsewhere, while a young mother tried to photograph her son on a mobile phone camera.

In another image taken at Malmo, a women reads a paper, a young boy sits on his board and stares at the floor, two young men stare out across the park, and four teenage girls chat among themselves – meanwhile a skater, in the middle right, shoots a double-axle carve in tough-looking concrete pool. Each of these five acts has equal weighting, each has the right to take our attention, and all together they make up a social setting made up of communication, speculating, thought and energetic action. It is an idyllic scene, a utopia of doing and thinking.

And of course none of this would occur without skateboarding, and skateboarding, that most social of sports, would not occur without them. Hudson’s images do not then, ultimately, displace skateboarding to the periphery; rather they radically expand the centre, and show us that the world of skateboarding is much, much greater than an explosive spectacle.

Iain Borden BA MSc MA PhD FRSA HonFRIBA
Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture & author of the book 'Skateboarding and the city'.