Richie Hopson is the most recent photographer to add to our “5000 Words” interview series. It was a pleasure to reconnect with Richie and to explore his work. Some examples had been relegated to lower piles of importance, and we are incredibly pleased to see them surface here…
words and interview by Jacob Sawyer. Richie Hopson Crail grinds on the Red Kite Ramp. PH: Gorm Ashurst
Richie Hopson recently posted a photo on Instagram, an unseen photo he had shot of Matt McMullan when he was first learning the ropes behind the lens. This image showed Matt’s raw power enabling him to levitate over Stockwell’s old moon-like surface. This photo fittingly closes out the article that it prompted, one which we were perhaps remiss in not attempting earlier. Richie was at first apprehensive about the quality of his archives but as the heavy hitters below attest he has taken numerous notable images over the decades, and like that photo of Matt McMullan (RIP) which was nestled in a drawer, we’re sure there are many more that we hope see the light of day in the coming months.
Richie got his first skateboard in the tail end of the seventies, that wave of plastic boards filling every toy shop had him skating the street outside his house. Then BMX bikes first hit the streets and he obsessed over the yellow and blue Team Murray bike in the window of Halfords until he got one. Like many kids in the eighties the BMX scene would be a gateway to skateboarding. BMX Action Bike became Skate Action before becoming RAD and the local bike shops with a skateboarding concession switched over the prominence of products. Although Richie watched the bike shop in Woking transform from Surrey BMX to Surrey Skates who furnished him with his first budget complete it was his grandmother who travelled back from a US visit with a Vision “Hippie Stick” who properly began his immersion into the culture that changed his trajectory.
Early on Richie made attempts at documenting his crew with pocket cameras and disposables. Thrasher had made an impact on his psyche, as had TLB’s photos in RAD. As his interest grew he eventually got a little Pentax and began to experiment properly. Randomly, a job in telemarketing connected him with a friend called Paul Bliss whose tales from a photography degree and beyond spawned in him a desire to properly learn the craft. Very soon a photography evening class delivered him to the darkroom. Freelance contributions led to photos appearing in mags like Sidewalk and then Adrenalin Magazine which evolved into Huck. Chris Nelson who ran the mag Free Ride would be the first person to commission him, entrusting Richie to cover a trip to Amsterdam with the Death Skateboards team, a trial by fire that led to more assignments.
Although his path led to his main employment being within the fashion world it also found him drawing from transferable skills. Being a dab hand with radio slaves when no-one else had heard of them made him an invaluable part of the crew who he was assisting, and his experience found him offering solutions out of the gate. From shooting the Death squad in Holland to immediately working on Prada campaigns, his evolution as a photographer was inevitable. His passion for skateboard photography would remain bubbling in the background. Skating itself coupled with searching for architecture, and attempting to skate the unskateable is an obsession that leaves you forever changed. The following photos, and Richie’s stories about them reinforce the fact that even if you’re not shooting skateboard photos daily, that roving eye will always be looking for the next one. Find out more about the photos Richie selected and enjoy his memories about some of the moments in time he captured…
Michał Juras – Backside Tailslide
I took this fourteen years ago but it feels like just the other day. Strangely, it was when I felt like I wasn’t really in the game anymore as a skateboard photographer. My wife is Polish and we were on holiday there, this was taken in Warsaw. She was a snowboarder back in the day and all of her friends were skateboarders. So a family friend offered to show us a skatepark down the road and he took us to see this place. It was an incredible concrete DIY park, you had to walk over this big grassy hill next to a big tower block and it revealed an old tennis court where this was built, it felt a little Animal Chin, this great DIY park. I was quite excited by it and our friend said he could get a guy to come down and skate it but I didn’t have my camera with me so we arranged to meet back there in the afternoon. Looking at the photo it’s interesting that I would have been travelling with a fisheye lens.
The friend turned out to be Michał Juras, we met, he did a few tricks for me and this was one of them. There’s a few things I liked about this that made me choose it. I love the idea of the DIY movement and I keep seeing the one they’ve built in Dulwich [The Grove DIY]. It goes back to building plywood ramps in the 80s but people are doing much better jobs with concrete with Burnside being the first great example. I just love the fact that these tiny little things exist and was so stoked to discover this place. I quite like the “Locals Only” painted on the ramp because bizarrely I never get that feeling when I go to a skatepark, I always feel welcome so I found that strangely contradictory. Maybe I got that wrong but I feel in Poland people are really excited to meet other skateboarders or people from other countries.
“you had to walk over this big grassy hill next to a big tower block and it revealed an old tennis court where this was built, it felt a little Animal Chin, this great DIY park”
In the surf world I know the “Locals Only” thing is a different thing altogether. I was working with Chris Nelson for a book he made about surfing called “Cold Water Souls”. It was about people who surf in cold climates, we went to Nova Scotia, Hokkaido in Japan, and people would tell us stories about the whole localism thing. If you went to surf someone’s secret break you’d come back to your car and they would have rubbed surf wax over your windscreen so your windscreen wipers wouldn’t work, they’d fill your car with pebbles. They really meant it, I think there’s enough to go round with skateboarding to not need to be that territorial. I understand it with backyard pools, you have a limited amount of time to skate them so anyone else going there ruins it for you but with something purpose built like this everyone should be welcome unless you’re on inline skates or a scooter.
Not a crazy story with this one but I felt like I was no longer a ‘skateboard photographer’ but then was excited by seeing this place which illustrates that it’s not just the skateboarding but for me there’s always the excitement of seeing skateable terrain.
Kip Sumpter – Wallride
This came about from the Mike Manzoori and Andy Humphries connection. Mike rode for ATM Click and then later for Adrenalin, Kip Sumpter coming over would have been when he rode for ATM Click. I was living with Andy Humphries at the time and Kip came over to stay for a couple of weeks so I got to go out with them a bit. Kip was travelling with another guy called Pete Mihalenko and they were both so fast and powerful. I’d never really seen anyone attack the street like they did. They would see stuff and just push so fast and hard at it. They almost had a bowl skater’s style, you know when someone pumps around one with so much power. Kip had that same approach on street, this power and strength, and he would try crazy stuff. We were going to Stockwell, we would go to Cantelowes when it was just the flat bank and the pyramid in the middle. Southbank was another destination. Looking at this photo I don’t think I had more than one flash.
“When people like Kip come to a spot they haven’t been to before they often see lines no-one else really has before”
When people like Kip come to a spot they haven’t been to before they often see lines no-one else really has before. He was instantly all over this wallride, I don’t know if anyone had seen that as a possibility or done it before but it was amazing to watch because the surface of that wall is horrible. I wasn’t a staff photographer for a mag so my opportunities were quite limited, this was a rare opportunity for me to shoot an American pro over here. Technically this isn’t a brilliant photograph but I love the washed out, monochromatic vibe it’s got and it’s a rad trick, that’s why I put this one in here
Ben Raemers
I think Ben was thirteen when I shot this. At the time Mark Munson was managing the Duffs team in the UK. He had discovered Ben and kept telling me that I have to see this kid skate, that he’s incredible. So I started trying to compile a feature with Ben for one of the magazines, I think it was Kingpin. I started going out in the car with Mark Munson, Ben [Raemers] and Carl Potter-Wilson and driving out into deepest, darkest Essex to skate random things at Universities and stuff. There was this little kid who seemed a bit out of place, there’s Mark Munson-this big personality, and this timid, little thirteen year old kid. He was an innocent young child and I think these portraits show that innocence. But to counter that he was absolutely fearless on a skateboard. If Mark Munson told him to do something, or try something, he’d try it.
He was an incredible kid. I think these pictures were shot one day after skating Meanwhile because they were taken in the basement of my office at the time, which was on All Saint’s Road. They were shot on a 4×5 camera, a large format camera so the film you use are these big sheets that are 4×5 inches that give you a lot of detail. You load them in the back, put a black cloth over your head, press the button, take it out and do it again. That’s what these are, I remember shooting them in our little backyard behind the office. The camera belonged to the fashion photographer I was working for so I had access, and this is as much abut me experimenting, and testing this stuff out. The photographs then became part of this feature we were working on. I love the one of him yawning with his hands behind his head because it shows his youth.
Ben Raemers – Feeble Grind
I have a folder called “The Duffs Crew” and this one is from that. The feature I worked on with Ben spanned a couple of months I would say. We were just out there collecting pictures as and when we could. They were great trips, it was always Carl [Potter-Wilson], Mark Munson, Ben [Raemers], and myself. Kevin Parrott was also there with the video camera filming what was going down. Fo most of the photographs I took Kevin would have been there filming alongside me. I think I actually shot a sequence of Ben doing his first ever 540. I guess I like the rawness of this one, it was taken at a school in Kensal Green. We knew it was going to be bit of a bust with the caretaker there hence the photo is black & white with no time to set up flashes or anything like that.
“I think I shot about four or five frames of it, he got it pretty much every go and that was a flexy old rail that rattled when you hit it too”
We had to put a piece of wood down on the run-up and you can see the lip of the wood at the top of the stairs. Ben had to drop down a couple of stairs, there was a little bit of flat, the piece of wood, and then he’d ollie onto this rail. I think I shot about four or five frames of it, he got it pretty much every go and that was a flexy old rail that rattled when you hit it too. I love that little puff of dust at the top of the rail, he must have hit that piece of wood and kicked up some dust into the atmosphere. It just makes it even more of a frozen moment in time. Also, whenever there was something Ben could do something good on, Carl [Potter-Wilson] would do something amazing on it too. Shooting with those guys was a great time. Obviously what happened with Ben is tragic, it’s all very sad so it’s nice to have those memories of him in these photographs. I was quite lucky to have documented a bit of that.
Carl Potter-Wilson – Frontside Ollie
These were some grain silos they took me out to in Suffolk. It’s a skateboarders dream, pulling up in the middle of the road and seeing this.There was a photo of Ben doing a beanplant to fakie off the end wall of this rusty silo which I shot fisheye, then Carl said that he could do this ollie. He started doing these ollies pretty high so I asked to shoot a photo of that too. The two photos are completely different, one is enclosed and super wide, the best way of showcasing the trick but it doesn’t show the scene. Then for this frontside ollie I could pull right back, get out of there and show the whole scene. I think I definitely prefer those photos that show a whole scene. As a photographer you have to do the trick and the skateboarder justice, that may not always be the best photo composition-wise as a photographer. With Carl’s photo it all works together, the ollie looks great but you also get this interesting photograph which adds a sense of scale, and a sense of place as well, where it is. In terms of bang for your buck, going out with Ben [Raemers], Carl [Potter-Wilson] and [Mark] Munson was amazing, you always had three people killing it which was great, they were always pushing each other too.
“I think this would be an interesting photo on it’s own, or with a farmer in it ploughing his field, you put a skateboarder in there and it’s kind of gold”
I think this would be an interesting photo on it’s own, or with a farmer in it ploughing his field, you put a skateboarder in there and it’s kind of gold. There’s another element I just thought of too – back in the days when you shot a landscape image like this you would be hoping it may be seen in a magazine, and that format with staples down the middle meant you would make your composition with the action on one side or the other so someone didn’t end up with a staple through their forehead. It would have been in mind that the image could look great with some text weighted on the opposite side. You would be making those considerations while shooting back then. Interestingly now I suppose that most people want to be photographing things portrait due to how we consume pictures most of the time. The Instagram format is 9:16 or square and the landscape format doesn’t hold up too well
Product toss at a Billabong Demo
This was shot at Playstation at the bottom of the vert ramp at a Billabong demo. It was the early 2000s and Pat Channita, Willy Santos, Chad Bartie, and Bucky Lasek had flown in to skate the demo. When I shot this I had a Mamiya 6 which was a medium format camera that could fold down really compact. It was a bit rubbish as a camera for skateboard photography but I was trying to make it work and get some good pictures out of it. This was a crazy time in skateboarding which I’m sure has repeated itself in history but skateboarding was really big. There was this ridiculousness of the kids all wanting a freebie, stickers, or T-Shirts. Whatever it was they were clamouring for it and it felt like a great moment. It wasn’t directed at the skateboarding but looking at an aspect of the culture and what was going on around it at that time beside the action. It’s kind of an action shot but it’s not skateboard action. I love that kid reaching up and grabbing for something, it reminds me of an old war photograph but it’s kids hungry for product. The kid at the bottom has gone a bit cross-eyed trying to look for something, and the kid next to him is writhing in pain. There’s a lot of stuff going on in there that I quite like. My office was on All Saints road so I remember when they were first building that park. I would go down Portobello Road to get my lunch, check in on the progress, and try to get a few sneaky skates in before it opened.
Lance Mountain in London
That photo on the sunken vert ramp reminded me of some shots I took of Lance Mountain, I came across them this morning. Lance came to town around this kind of time and I took a photo of him doing a frontside air and a frontside invert on this same ramp. He was staying at this hotel out in Bayswater and I remember going over to the hotel, I can’t remember if it was arranged or if I was just winging it. But I asked if we could shoot some photos out on the street and I got some photos of him cruising up and down the road. He did that thing in Powell videos where he would run up the wall and do a backflip. I asked him if he could still do it and he even gave it a go so I also have some pictures of him attempting a backflip which is pretty funny. I don’t know how we ended up at Playstation, I probably asked him what he was doing that night and suggested he check out the park. It’s amazing that legendary stuff like that could just happen. I was quite keen at that time to capture portraits of everyone as well so I have some portraits of him too. It was something people were doing less back then, skateboard photography seemed to be just that, at least what was being published. I remember it being quite hard to encourage people to publish a picture that wasn’t a skateboarder skateboarding. That’s why publications like Huck and Adrenalin magazine suited me quite well I think. They were interested in showing the culture around it all.
Tony Trujillo in Marseille
This was a time when I was trying to get my pictures published in skateboard magazines. I had a good relationship with Adrenalin magazine, I had already shot some stuff for them and that mag later evolved into Huck. So this trip to Marseille was a really lovely commission for them. I had been to Marseille a couple of times independently already for the competitions and skating with mates. This was a really good time, twenty of your mates were all out there for the competition, there to skate, and then there’s this Bowlriders comp, this epic spectacle. It did a get a bit commercial in the end but what an incredible bowl, and it drew all of these legendary skateboarders from America, and all over the world. The year I shot this Chet Childress was there, John Ponts was there, and Tony Trujillo was there at the height of his popularity. He was one of the top skateboarders at that time, and encapsulated that Rock N’ Roll image.
“I was fortunate to be there with this incredibly loose brief, I was encouraged to basically shoot whatever I want”
I was fortunate to be there with this incredibly loose brief, I was encouraged to basically shoot whatever I want. They didn’t want a skateboarding feature, more just a piece on Marseille. I was trying to shoot people’s shadows while they were in the air, taking pictures of people’s leather jackets and the patches and punk rock emblems on them. It was a liberating brief. The other thing about that event was that if you saw any coverage it was really bright, lots of blue and red signage, Quiksilver branding, and it was really busy visually. It looked like any other event so I decided to shoot it all black & white. These were the days of actually shooting film so you had to make that decision consciously before you even went there as you had to buy the film to take with you. I opted for black & white to strip out all of that excessive information with all the colour. I also wanted the pictures to look different from what the other twenty or thirty photographers were going to come back with. I just had to shoot the event and the people which is why I was looking for moments like this one.
I can’t remember what he [Tony Trujillo] had been trying at this point but he’d obviously been trying it a lot and failing. There was this moment of exhaustion at the bottom of the bowl. It looks quite peaceful but there are about 600-1000 people standing around the bowl looking at him with the Marseille heat pounding down on him. So there’s this isolated moment which is surrounded by chaos. I’m a huge fan of Shepard Fairey and have a few of his prints here so the fact that his Andre the Giant image is surrounding him is kind of the icing on the cake really.
Mark “Fos” Foster Heroin Skateboards Ad
I knew Fos just through skateboarding for years. Then he worked at the Slam warehouse in West London so I would see quite a lot of him when I was working over that way too. He had asked me to shoot some photos for Heroin so I shot photos with Chris Pulman, Fos, and a few others. With this photo he had specifically said that he needed to put an ad in Sidewalk fast and could I shoot it. He had an idea of what he wanted to do, he always has a firm idea of what’s good so we shot this. I gave you this one not because I think it’s a great photo as far as what I’m doing my end – don’t get me wrong it’s a great trick, but I chose it because I love people’s scribbling and doodling over photographs. Fos was always brilliant at scribbling and writing things over photos. Every time I gave him a photograph I was excited to see what he would have done with it when it came back.
“Every time I gave him a photograph I was excited to see what he would have done with it when it came back”
I love all of his ideas and jokes “ I love the smell of Stockwell in the morning”, all of that stuff is great. It goes back to something you had said to me earlier this collaborative effort between the photographer and the skateboarder. Whether I find a location and ask if someone can skate it, or they have a fixed idea of what they want to do and where. This takes that a bit further, once the picture is taken someone can add their work to it and make it better than it was. What I loved about [Chris] Pulman, Fos, Nick Orecchio, Dan Cates, and all these guys was their dedication to do weird tricks in weird places and skate things that weren’t meant to be skated. Stockwell is maybe an exception but they all shared the same stoke on riding weird stuff which probably wasn’t very fashionable back then. Calling your company Heroin in the first place would have been against most people’s advice as far as a marketing move. It’s worked out though, he definitely marches to the beat of his own drum.
Tamago – Kickflip
I used to live on this road, it’s Randolph Avenue in Maida Vale. This spot was on the end of my road, and all around West London were many weird, potentially skateable things. I had this good working relationship with Foster and he had this whole crew of Japanese riders who were coming over to do a little tour of the UK. I had this bunch of random spots I’d been keeping up my sleeve to try and take people to. They weren’t that top secret but had potential for the right person. The spot is probably still there, it’s a college. So we had the spot, there were five skateboarders and one of them [Tamago] decided he could do the best trick on it. It was brilliant, it’s pretty hard to get any speed up there but what a great kickflip he managed to do. He got up there, he probably had four or five attempts at it, and we were out of there before we got kicked out. I had quite a few spots I had obsessed about someone skating and this is one of them. I picked this photo again because of a layout that Fos did with the picture. It just reinforces that I love Fos’ style of illustration and how he would just slap it over a picture and just make things look better. When it went into the magazine this was the opening page and I loved how Fos brought it to life.
Laurie Sherman – Frontside axle stall
Being a photographer it’s often hard to settle on the angle, what best shows the trick, the terrain, and what went into making it possible. Finding what you’re happy with as a photograph is a bit of a dilemma. You’re trying to fulfil different criteria. You want to do the skateboarder justice but also make it work the best from a creative point of view. The top photo shows how hard that thing is to skate but doesn’t show the wood run up. So without the other angle someone who hasn’t been there wouldn’t know that what Laurie is skating is just a piece of concrete in the middle of a field. That’s why I complimented it with the other one. That thing must have been built with BMX bikes in mind. The top photo shows both of Laurie [Sherman]’s axles on the lip, he’s in 50-50 but the only way he could really make it work was by power-sliding up the last bit to get his trucks up onto it. It’s amazing looking at where he is, where his body weight is, it’s so rad, on a tiny board. The thing is over vert too because of how it subsided over the thirty or forty years it had stood there. I had to pick two here because one picture doesn’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes it’s quite nice when you’re left guessing, sometimes you need a little more.
“I had to pick two here because one picture doesn’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes it’s quite nice when you’re left guessing, sometimes you need a little more”
I used to love shooting photos with Laurie that’s why there are two in here. We had so many things in common, from music onwards that it was always a pleasure going out with him on a mission. I always knew we were going to come back with a photo. There’s something timeless about his skateboarding, much of it could have been doing in the 70s but it looks super cool. We were shooting these photos at a time when everything was quite tech in the skateboard media so they buck that trend. We were there with Mattias [Nylen] who was trying a frontside rock on it which he may have made actually. We used my car and took these stolen pieces of wood from West London all the way across to South East London to make the run up so he could even skate it in the first place. You can’t see that factor from the side view but that angle best illustrates how over vert that thing was. He couldn’t make it up there to the grind but could kind of air into a truck bash. It’s great going somewhere unique like that with two rad skateboarders who just keep pushing each other in terms of what’s possible. I really miss seeing Laurie all the time.
Laurie Sherman – Viaduct kickturn
This picture I would probably say is my greatest hit as far as skateboarding photography. This came about through a skateboarder called Howard Byrom. I used to skate Stockwell with Howard, he used to have the best nollies over the bump there, and still does. Howard was a writer and he was working for the National Geographic. He called me one day to say he was doing some research and found this place called the Balcombe Viaduct in West Sussex and it looks like you might be able to skate it. He sent me a picture and it looked promising. We arranged to go down there one day, it was Howard [Byrom], myself, Laurie [Sherman], and Tom Crowe. In a village in the middle of nowhere is this field, and running through this field is a giant Viaduct, this huge structure which is a railway bridge. It doesn’t look like a huge amount from the street, you can’t really see these transitions. It’s only when you get alongside it and look down the length of it that you can see it with the railway line running above your head.
It’s insanely hard to ride, there’s no flat bottom so how do you generate speed and keep your momentum? I came equipped with some soft wheels which Laurie put on and made work. It’s another one I tried to shoot from different angles. I tried it with a wide angle lens, I even went there with Ross McGouran on another occasion and he did some ollies to fakie in it which is arguably a better trick but wasn’t a better photo. There was something about this photo of Laurie. This was all shot using transparency film before the age of digital so you really had no idea what was going to come back from the lab a few days later. But there was something about it, when I was looking at it I was thinking- if what I can see with my eyes comes out I would be stoked. It ended up coming back better than what my eyes saw with this weird infinity perspective to it. It’s super hard to do what Laurie is doing don’t get me wrong, it’s a very simple trick but in my mind that adds to the timeless beauty of it.
“This was all shot using transparency film before the age of digital so you really had no idea what was going to come back from the lab a few days later”
This photo ran in Kingpin. I’m not sure how the British Journal of Photography cottoned on to this photo and they put it on the cover of the magazine and they did something about my photography and called it something cheesy like “Chairman of the Board” or something like that. At the same time I remember getting a call from a producer from some kind of commercial company. He called me to ask where it was exactly and I said I didn’t really want to tell him, I felt if they went there they would probably come back with the same thing. I just said they should find it themselves. Then they called me back a few hours later to ask if the photo was real or had been generated on a computer. I told them it was real but that I was still not going to tell them where it is, hahaha. Obviously a few people have been and shot photos there now but there was a thing back then.
Mike Manzoori – Wallie
I’ve known Mike for a long time. He had left the UK at this point and been in America doing the whole thing working for Sole Technology. He was back in England for what felt like quite a few months actually. I think he was renewing a Visa and he was also looking after Tom Penny. I remember Tom hanging out at our flat and going to various places with him and Mike during that time. We’d go to Royal Oak and I occasionally took some photos of Tom but he was never happy with the tricks. As Mike was here for a bit we decided to get together and try to shoot an article. Mike’s an amazing human being, he’s an incredible skateboarder, and he can ride anything and everything. This spot was in Swiss Cottage. I have skated this spot with my friend Lalo actually, it’s a carpark next to school. It’s a really steep little bank up to that wall. It was Mike’s idea, he thought it would make a good photograph so we went and shot it. We shot at Stockwell, Meanwhile Gardens, here, a few other places, and got a nice little feature together. He’s a lovely guy I’ve known for a long time so it was really nice to get to shoot something like that with him. You can see Mike’s power in this photo, he’s driving that skateboard. It’s always a pleasure shooting someone like that.
Nick Orecchio – Backside Carve
It doesn’t get much more ridiculous than this. Nothing was off the table with the Death crew. Anything could be skated, however rubbish it was, and regardless of the amount of effort required in sweeping it, scraping it, or fixing it. They were devoted and dedicated to skating the unskateable. I can’t remember exactly where this spot is, it’s outside of the M25 somewhere near Farnborough. I think they sold pipes there right? Look at that elephant! It’s some kind of pipe company and this thing was there. We’d been driving for about an hour and a half at that point to get there, and you never know what you’re going to find with Nick and Dan but you’re going to get something out of it. Every mission was an adventure, and it was always fun going to shoot with those guys. This is one of the photos that came out of it. Another thing that’s crazily hard to ride. Nick is another amazing guy, from having those houses in Harrow where he would operate a distribution business out of his bedroom with a backyard bowl in the garden. His dedication to skateboarding and the cause is just amazing. He’s absolutely 100 percent committed to skating, living and breathing it, and this kind of shows that. I miss going on stupid adventures with the Death crew for sure.
Dan Tubb – Frontside Carve
This was a really good mission, it ended up running in Adrenalin Magazine. We were at Rom [Romford] skatepark, I think we had been shooting something there. Then I heard someone say that they were going to go off to a full-pipe. It was kind of a whisper that something else was going on. The plan was to get in their cars and head out to some cement factory. I was with my friend Lalo at the time and we managed to get an invite to tag along. What followed was one of the most insane missions I think I’ve ever been on to get a photograph.
We travelled in convoy to a huge cement factory in Gravesend on the Thames Estuary, we parked our cars and walked down to a wall. We climbed over the wall and then had to walk along a ledge which was about two feet wide. If you fell off this ledge you would end up in the river Thames on the East side of the Dartford tunnel. There were probably about six of us walking out along this ledge. I had this ridiculously large Profoto battery pack with me to light this thing. I have this battery pack, a camera bag, someone else has a broom, we’re all carrying skateboards. We had to walk a long way along this ledge where you could fall to your death. Then we all tiptoed our way through this cement factory to get to this pipe.
“this photo feels like one of those timeless ones with a crazy mission to get there as the story behind it”
When you’re in situations like this you have to get on with capturing it pretty fast because your window is not going to last very long. If you look at the centre of the pipe there’s something black there, that’s where I clamped my light and ran a cable down one of the posts. So the cancerous cement dust was swept up and then people started to skate it. Then very quickly these two guys appeared wearing High Vis jackets. I instantly thought that meant we were done but they came over and said “that’s amazing, we used to skate”. So we invited them to come and watch. Then this amazing session went on for twenty minutes or half an hour. You can’t see it very well but there’s a seam that runs around the circumference of the pipe. There’s actually a seam in that section you’re riding so you have to either ollie over that or in between it. What’s also not visible immediately is that if you look to the bottom right there are all of these pipes of rebar which are poking out. If you look up there’s more of them, all of this metal rebar poking out of the pipe. It was super hazardous in there and it was massive, that transition was gigantic. Dan Tubb could naturally skate that thing straight away and this photo feels like one of those timeless ones with a crazy mission to get there as the story behind it. We then had to tiptoe all the way along that ledge again to get out of there too.
I can see Martin Herrick in the foreground, Ginger Steve was there who has the best layback grinds, Wolfy [Chris Woolf] is there on the left, they’re the Harrow crew. There were lots of great skateboarders out there like them going off and skating all of this crazy stuff that went largely undocumented. This ran as an eight page feature, it was more of a documentary piece, there were a couple of skate shots in there but I had also documented the mission.
Mattias Nylen – Mayday
I shot this when I was trying to do a feature with Mattias, he was, and probably still is a super talented skateboarder. He could destroy almost anything. He really could destroy old concrete stuff though. I’d take him to Romford, to Southsea, Harrow to spots like the over vert wall that Laurie [Sherman] is skating in this article. As a by-product of those missions I ended up shooting for this series of articles for Sidewalk called Concrete Carcasses which focused on these old remaining parks like Stevenage and others. 
The projects were Black & White, slightly architectural and abstract. This session would have been with Mattias [Nylen], Emilio Arnanz, Fos [Mark Foster], and Howard Byrom who I mentioned earlier. It was a solid crew.
Mattias had a pretty strong idea of what he was going to do. This pivot to fakie in the snake run at Southsea wasn’t hard for him. The reason that I chose this one is because we always wanted the photo to look cool and credible. There’s the whole thing with skate park photos where a helmet changes the whole aesthetic of what you’re doing. If you look in the background of this photo towards the floor you will see a helmet suspended in the air. In order for us to not get thrown out of the park and to get this trick done we had to be creative.
“In order for us to not get thrown out of the park and to get this trick done we had to be creative”
The guys who ran the skate park were just doing their job and it was park policy that you had to wear a helmet to skate the place. So Mattias would wear the helmet when he was rolling in and visible, then he’d throw it off as far as he could before trying to do the trick and shooting the photo. To give you an idea of how quickly that all happened is shown by the helmet still actually being in the air as it bounces off the ground. Then you’ve got Kev Parrott perched in the top corner with his fisheye lens, he would be out filming
Matt McMullan – Ollie
This photo was shot a long time ago, it’s Stockwell before it was ever resurfaced. I was living in South East London at this time with Andy Humphries so Stockwell was my local at the time. I used to go down there a lot and it was 1998 when it got that red surface facelift, this is way before that. This was shot during my early days of experimenting with photography, around the time one of my early shots of Pete Corry was published. I would have been sending these photos to the magazines and they were not getting picked because they just weren’t great photographs technically. But I was spending loads of time skating at Stockwell. It was slow at that point, the original surface was slow and wheels were hard. Matt McMullan and Reuben Goodyear just ruled that place. It almost felt like they would always push off together, they had a doubles snake run thing going on. They would always both ollie over that first hump and then peel off in different directions. They both had so much style, so much flow, and so much pop. I think of the two of them together really, they were always there sessioning.
“I’m really glad I captured this one, it was just forgotten in a drawer for many years alongside others that hadn’t been deemed as being good enough to be published”
This could have been any winter session down there really during the mid-nineties. Look at how high that ollie is, Matt used to just float over that hip. You can’t underestimate how hard that was either, that place is really fast now but back then you were pushing as hard as you possibly could to get round there and have enough speed to pop over that, let alone float like he is here. He [Matt McMullen] had so much skill, I remember him from the mid-eighties too when he used to skate South Bank all the time. This is back when people would ollie the little driveway, hit the bank to wall, and then come back around. He was in the mix at those sessions all the time and was always a super talented skateboarder. This photo has a weird colour cast on it because it’s when I was experimenting so the whole photographic thing was very much trial and error (before digital). This was shot on a transparency film, it looks like Kodak EPS which is a tungsten balanced film. It’s intended to be used indoors under really warm lighting so the colour goes neutral but because I’ve used it outside in the daylight everything has gone kind of blue. The scene at Stockwell was great at this time, everyone would hang out, skate, and then go to the pub at the end of the day. Two constants there were always Matt McMullan and Reuben Goodyear just killing it. I’m really glad I captured this one, it was just forgotten in a drawer for many years alongside others that hadn’t been deemed as being good enough to be published. I guess now there are more ways to show people pictures, and they don’t have to be technically perfect to be appreciated.
We would like to thank Richie for taking this trip through his archives and for getting all of the images ready. You can see more of what Richie is up to via his Instagrram or over at his Website. We would also like to thank Kevin Parrott for raiding his hard drives for the Mattias Nylen Southsea clip, and Gorm Ashurst for the sick photo of Richie doing a crail grind which opened this article.
Other related reading: Industry: Kevin Parrott , Mike Manzoori Interview , Ben Raemers Interview , First & Last: Lance Mountain , My Board: Mark “Fos” Foster
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