Blabac Photo review
Jay Riggio gives us his lowdown on this mammoth skate photography book.
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Today, after much anticipation, I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of the long awaited coffee table-style book, Blabac Photo: The Art of Skateboarding Photography.
The book is basically a best-of-the-best from longtime skate photographer extraordinaire Mike Blabac, chronicling his photography from the beginning of his career to the present day. It’s a massive thing; cloth-bound, large format, hard cover and clocking in at 224 pages. Hell, it doesn’t even fit onto my bookshelf which isn’t a bad thing at all.
Now as far as skateboarding is concerned, Blabac has roots. As a staff photographer for the late '90s brand, Mad Circle, he was able to chronicle the rise of fresh talent like Bobby Puleo, Karl Watson, Scott Johnston and Rob Welsh, and successfully shot an entire era of San Francisco skateboarding.
Mike went on to be the Girl/Chocolate staff photographer, capturing classic moments of Eric Koston, Mike Carroll, Guy Mariano and many, many others during some of the brands' most classic years. However, it wasn’t until he became DC’s full-time skate photographer that his style seemed to fully blossom. Shooting DC’s past and present line-up over his 10-year tenure, Blabac’s artistic eye has since become synonymous with the brands overall aesthetic feel.
Blabac Photo features an enormous collection of amazing skate shots and portraits of your favorite skaters through the years. Including nostalgic snaps of Jamie Thomas, Drake Jones, Josh Kalis, Stevie Williams, Rob Dyrdek, AVE, Ryan Smith, Colin McKay, Jason Dill and many more. There’s even a pre-pubescent Paul Rodriguez kickflip shot in there which happens to be P-Rod’s first photo in a skate mag.
Stand-out areas of Blabac’s documentation exist throughout the book but my favorite belong to his chronicling of Philly’s Love Park and Danny Way’s quick transition from skateboarder to stunt man. His photos of Love Park at the height of its popularity help solidify the East Coast spot in skateboarding history. And Blabac’s shots of Danny Way entering the world of mega-ramp insanity are beautiful and almost surreal.
In addition, the book includes commentary by legendary industry heads and friends of Blabac’s including J. Grant Brittain, Jake Phelps, Aaron Meza, Ken Block, Greg Hunt and Dave Swift. As an added bonus to the books overall charm, Blabac uses the index to give brief descriptions of each photo, often noting interesting facts about the origin and timelessness of the shot.
As far as skate books go, Blabac Photo is a must have for any skateboarder and/or photographer. Flipping through will bring about inspiration whether you like it or not.
Check out our interview with Mike Blabac in HUCK#016, out early August.
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Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
Blabac Photo review (text) by is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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