For the full feature, check out HUCK#020 in our Digital Archive.

The exhibition is open submission, which means that anyone can send their work in to be included.

If you are interested, please send your photos before June 18 to:

The Photocopy Club,
UNIT D and E Level 2 South,
New England House,
New England Street,
Brighton,
BN1 4GH

All artwork will be sold during the exhibition for between £2-£5 (depending on its size) to cover The Photocopy Club's costs.

There will be a private view party on Thursday June 21 from 7pm, so register at eventbrite to put your name on the guestlist.

The sale features over 100 one-off cruiser decks designed by the likes of Ed Templeton, Lance Mountain and Don Pendleton.

There's even a very unskateable one from HUCK#032 cover star, Thomas Campbell.

All the proceeds from the sale will go towards building a new skate spot, Ride It Sculpture Park, in Detroit, Michigan.

Bidding closes on May 26, so hurry.

It sees some raw skate action from the likes of Justin Brock, Kyle Leeper and Austyn Gillette accompanied by what looks like a webcam of a random girl in the corner.

Perhaps a comment on the dual screening, short-attention-span consumption of the age?

...or not.

For the full feature, check out HUCK#012 in our Digital Archive.

It gives a flavour pro longboarder/musician/artist Alex Knost dancing around on some small waves on his log.

Pretty idyllic, eh?

Check out a bigger peak into Alex Knost's world in HUCK#032.

This may be a very small gesture but it seems to be the perfect antidote to how disposable photography has become nowadays. People must take hundreds of photos a month but how long do they take to actually look at and appreciate them before sticking them up on Facebook, getting a few likes and LOLs, and then leaving them to sit on Mark Zuckerberg's hard drive for the rest of eternity for him to do with them as he wishes? *Evil chuckle* But by printing it out – you know, like photos used to be before digital cameras and Instagram – actually helps you take a step back and enjoy them on a whole new level, from fleeting glances to full-on, chin-stroking scrutiny.

And totally un-coincidentally, HUCK#032 is all about exploring the appeal of creating 'real' things like this, from handcrafted wooden sea and snow sticks in New England to political activists sewing handkerchiefs to affect change. But it recently struck me that we are revering creative skills like needle work and carpentry as novelty and groundbreaking when a generation ago, they were mainstream. A few decades ago when you wanted a jumper, you bought a pattern, a ball of wool and knitted it. You wanted a kitchen table? You went to the forest, chopped down an oak tree, dragged it home and whittled the fuck out of it! But nowadays, thanks to the growth of global flow of capital, nice big companies just find people in less developed countries they don't have to pay much to make them for us all. Happy days!

But apart from the many ethical questions that this capitalist trend raises, it seems that this separation from the process of creation and ownership is leaving people somehow unfulfilled. It's easy to see why. The things we consume are often only an infinitely duplicated collection of noughts and ones – music, films, apps, video games, magazines – or, if they are actually 'real', have been spun, woven and moulded in far away lands with the intention of being thrown away in a few months time when a shinier version comes along. And as the laws of economics dictate, the more abundant things are, the less value they're perceived to have. Think about it, now you can access more music than you could listen to in your whole lifetime from your mobile phone, what does 'owning' your favourite album mean to you?

Therefore, when people actually get their hands dirty and put the time in to create something unique, it really resonates with them. They value and treasure it so much more. Come to think of it, one of my favourite 'objects' is a cardboard model of MF Doom that I cut out of myself with a scalpel accompanied by lots of angry screams of frustration - I'm not very good at such tasks. It's the identification with the process of making it and the investment of your own time that's so much more fulfilling than clicking on a website and waiting for it to download or the postman to arrive.

That's not to say that the modern industrial means of production don't have their benefits. The mass production of things like food, clothing and medicine have helped billions around the world achieve a better standard of living, and stopped a lot of people from dying. But it has also churned out plenty of shiny little precious things that, after the initial flurry of excitement from purchasing, are utterly devoid of meaning or use, or both, to the owner.

Ok, the world would be a pretty grim, utilitarian place if we did away with these things entirely, but maybe next time you're contemplating 'consuming' something like this, why not try and make it yourself instead of just picking something up from the worldwide production line?

Don't worry, you can always Google how...

He was just eighteen when he found an old instant camera in his girlfriend's car and then hopped on a night freight train heading away from his home in Pensacola, Florida. But the beautiful shots of bohemia that he returned with were like colourful capsules from another planet. His new book, A Period Of Juvenile Prosperity, shot throughout 2007 and 2008, is an epic collection of the people and places he's met on his dusty travels.

HUCK caught up with Brodie recently to find out more about the mythical subjects and scenes he captures and documents.

HUCK: You've been shooting photos since you were eighteen – why wait till now to put out a book?
Mike Brodie: Well, I chose to put out a book about four years ago but it just takes a long time. My friend Paul [Schiek, of TBW Books] has been helping a lot with it and we've just been taking our time to make sure everything's perfect.

Do you feel a sense of distance from the photos because they were taken so long ago?
Yeah, I remember them happening but I feel very disconnected from them at the same time. They make me feel pretty intense when I look at the prints. I see a lot of things in the photos that I've never seen before. They just look different when they're printed.

What is it you try to capture with your photos?
I'm always daydreaming about what I want to photograph in my head. It usually involves being out in nature and away from people, just with my friends, partying and being idiots. So I take photos of that, most of the time, just for fun. I'm constantly daydreaming about different trips I want to take and different places I want to be and new scenes that I want to see.

And that usually takes you outside the confines of the city?
Naturally, me and my friends rebel against urban life. I just want to know a lot more about nature. Living in the city can be depressing. A lot of kids are growing up, myself included, out of touch with nature. I spend most of my time in cities, and cities are cool, but I want to know more about the world; nature, plants and animals.

But you seem fascinated with anything old and industrial too?
Anything old is interesting because it has character, y'know? It has a whole story, a whole life. It's kind of sad when things start to rot, but they become way more interesting. It's easy to be intrigued by abandoned infrastructure or industry and see beauty in it. I really like things that work too. I really like things that are functional. I went to mechanics school and I worked on the railroad full-time for a while, but I quit last year. I think it's good to have skills aside from artistic things like photography. I wanted to have a trade and a skill that was applicable to other things in life. Maybe I'll go back down that path in the future – that skill will always be there.

What makes you want to travel?
I grew up riding BMX and I was always doing things illegally; sneaking around and running from security. I was always exploring and biking and finding new places to ride; running and moving and climbing and knowing something might happen at any moment. So I guess that developed into my curiosity for travelling, seeing more of the country and riding freight trains. I definitely transitioned into that because of BMX. I'm just a curious person and it's just fun to go out on adventures and trips. It doesn't have to be on a train, you can just get in a pick-up truck and drive across the state, or drive across the country. I like that sense of adventure and moving and looking at the world around you. Just like what the people in old country songs sing about.

Is there a big train-hopping community? Is it dangerous?
Hopping trains is dangerous but I think it's more dangerous to drive to work on the interstate. Traffic is way more unpredictable. With a train, you're on a set course and it's up to you whether you get injured or not. Your safety is up to you. There's a really big community of people who hop trains, all over North America, and other parts of the world too. But most of it stems from US subculture. I have a big peer group who do it and there are a bunch of older people, who did it before me. People aren't thinking about it, so they don't notice. It happens under the radar a lot of the time. But as long as there have been trains, there have been people hopping them.

Your photos seem to suggest a different way of life. Are you frustrated by the way the world is?
I've always wanted to do the opposite to anything conventional. I guess I'm frustrated by responsibility. Why do I need to pay lots of bills? Why do I need so much stuff? I want to figure out how I can live easy and still be productive and positive and a good person. So I end up going against conventional ways of living I guess. I travel because it's fun and there's always an end point; like a person I care about. And when I get to where I'm going it feels good because it took a lot of work. I guess I like doing things the hard way. Maybe it's more satisfying that way? I have this big map where I draw on train lines that I've ridden. It's really satisfying finding new lines and drawing them on.

Do you think more people have been pushed to the outskirts of society because of the economic crisis?
The economy will and has pushed a lot more people on the outskirts of society; whether it's families consolidating in one home, or just people living with less. I live in Oakland, California, and you see people everywhere, just sleeping outside. I think it does push people out more. Once people have less money.

Your photos are more fine art than documentary but is photojournalism something you'd be interested in doing?
Maybe in the future I will look back and write more about the experiences I've had. [My photography is] not documentary because it's mostly just the life that happens around me. Maybe in the future I'll do more documentary and I'll go somewhere to photograph a certain thing, that I'm not necessarily a part of. I'm interested in photographing anything but usually it has to involve some kind of train or truck or highway. I like spending time with most people and hearing their stories and maybe taking a photo and seeing what I get. I like just having fun and exploring things for myself. I wouldn't necessarily seek out trying to photograph homeless people, but if that happened it's okay.

Are you inspired by other photographers?
Oh yeah. Jacob Holdt, he photographed in the sixties using this really cheap camera that cost thirty bucks. And he just photographed racism in America, and those photos are really cool. I think he was from Denmark. He's really inspiring. I'm just inspired by National Geographic magazine – I like all of that. There are a lot of other photographers too.

Would you say your photos are kind of celebrating experience over material things?
Oh yeah definitely. Experience is definitely better than just having things and it's fun to experience things with friends and people you care about, share stories and stuff like that. I've never wanted to be rich or have a lot of things. There are things that I like that are really cool and expensive that I wish I had but I know that it's unreasonable for my life. But I can appreciate people's interest in those things, I'm not going to judge someone for whatever reasons, I still like having things. Experience over material possession, I'm glad that's conveyed in the photos. I'm not trying to convey anything with my photography, I just like to take pictures and see how they come out. Other people can paint a picture of what they think it means. Kind of how you listen to a song and decide what it means to you. It's cool that way. I would like anyone to interpret my photos however they want. I'm not sure what it all quite means. These photos are an open story. There'll be time for narrative in the future; I'll share more about certain individuals as time passes. Right now, it doesn't really matter.

What are your plans for the future?
This year is pretty crazy for various reasons. I have a couple of photo exhibitions lined up that I'm really looking forward to that will coincide with the book release. And I'm going to three weddings and my dad's getting out of prison; he's been in prison for eight-and-a-half years. I have a lot of travel plans with friends including going to Detroit, Michigan, going to Mexico. I'm looking forward to having a good time this year and getting some things done. And making enough money to pay my rent. I live in Oakland, California. It's pretty fun but it's kind of crappy. I live close to the train yard so it's nice to be around the trains a lot and my roommate works for the railroad so it's nice to hear his stories about working. I'm in the city but we're really close to nice nature. There's a lot to do here.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is out on Twin Palms in September 2012.

As you'd expect, it sees the surfer/environmentalist Dave Rastovich musing on the surfing Shangri La that is Hawaii.

And he also puts down a musical tribute to the Pacific archipelago by way of his ukulele.

For the majority of eco-minded boardriders, it was a reminder that our primary tool is petroleum based - as are our wetsuits, booties, snowboards, bindings, outerwear, watches and must-have bags. If it weren’t for the seven plies of maple we kick around the street, we’d be total assholes. Well, hypocrites at least.

Almost every piece of gear we use to access nature is a detriment to it. And despite our desire to ‘carve a different path’, we sure do resemble the society we aimed to set ourselves apart from - worshipping idols (aka ‘ambassadors’) employed to divert our attention away from the fact that, despite the pretty logos, they’re all just moving units. It stands to reason that in the Northeast region of the US, the geographical and metaphorical opposite of Southern California where ninety-nine per cent of the industry is based, there should exist a pair of companies – Grain Surfboards and PowderJet Snowboards – that are living the freethinking mantra, not just marketing it.

“What we do is give people a choice,” says Brad Anderson, the fifty-one-year old co-owner of Grain Surfboards, whose life resume includes ship captain, land conservation director and wood worker. “If you can live by the values that you feel strongly about and make those present in your product, then it gives all those other surfers out there, who may be inclined that way, a choice. It’s a choice to adhere to those values – to get a surfboard that doesn’t make them feel like they’re betraying everything that they believe in.”

Jesse Loomis, PowderJet Snowboards

The stories of Grain Surfboards and PowderJet Snowboards – based in Vermont and Maine, respectively - aren’t just intertwined with New England’s heritage of hand-wrought craft, but also with each other. Grain founder Mike LaVecchia and PowderJet’s Jesse Loomis met in the early 1990s and both wound up working at Burton’s Burlington HQ. Although it wasn’t until 2005 that the idea of the wooden surfboard took root in Mike’s mind, the next decade played out as an apprenticeship of sorts.

Working right on Lake Champlain, Mike bought and restored a wooden boat, then left Burton in 1995 to spend two months sailing a thirty-eight-foot sailboat to the Florida Keys. He earned his captain’s license, launched a sailing charter operation and, by 2001, was hired by the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum to build a replica of an eighty-eight-foot, 1862-class Canal schooner, which had sunk in 1876. Jesse, meanwhile, discovered he wasn’t a shabby lensman and moved to California to take up a photography position at Transworld Snowboarding. But by 1998, he was back on the East Coast honing a new skill. “My wife and I bought a house in Burlington, and I started learning some basic carpentry in order to fix it up. When we got preggers in 2000, we decided to move out to the country to raise feral children, and I became a full time carpenter,” he recalls.

In 2005, Mike moved to Maine and built his first wooden surfboard. Soon after, spurred by his interest in conservation and craft, Brad Anderson stopped by to check things out. Like Mike, he’d started surfing later in life and neither was enamoured with the idea of buying a board straight off the rack. “The first time I called him was out of the blue I had to look up his name in the white pages. There was no ‘Grain’ yet - he was still in the basement,” recalls Brad. “He was working in a cave - no light, a few crappy tools, a couple of boards, aborted frame tests, scraps and shit everywhere, all covered with dust. It was like he was a cave-dwelling surf terrorist secretly preparing an attack on an infidel industry who'd gotten away with building an evil empire of toxic wave-toys for too long.”

By 2006, Brad was a co-owner and a few months later they moved to their current location, a farm just a few miles from York Beach, on the southern coast of Maine. Soon they were shaping boards, selling ‘Homegrown’ kits to hands-on surfers and hosting weeklong classes at their shop, all the while cultivating a worldwide following of surfers and hobbyists eager to be part of a DIY community.

“There’s just constant motion and always a good feeling at Grain,” explains Jesse, who shaped the odd surf craft from his mountain workshop for Grain. “I thought they had such a great idea. It was eco-sensitive and different from the normal surfboard. It took about two years to say, ‘What the hell? Why don’t I just do this with snowboards?’ It makes so much more sense for me, living in Vermont.”

By January 2009, Jesse was ready to snow-test his first board on the wooded hillside near his home. “I followed the old logging road up into the trees, then stopped for a minute to catch my breath. I was pretty nervous that the board was going to feel wonky, awkward or just wrong. Before I could spend too much time thinking about it, I strapped in, pointed the nose down the logging road and straight-lined it… I couldn't believe it rode exactly the way I’d hoped it would. From that point on it was just laughter - a solitary fool on the hill just laughing.”

"Human history is rife with examples of people thinking a resource would never run out and time has always proved that to be an error in judgement."

Grain’s testing ground is just as quaint. Long Sands, the jewel of Maine’s York Beach, is a two-mile sandy nook on a coastline known for rocky crannies that attracts droves of Massachusetts tourists (affectionately referred to by locals as ‘Massholes’) who battle for blanket space all summer long. Around every corner are lobster rolls, hand-knitted scarves, organic eggs and wood-roasted coffee. Maine does have its secret spots - some guarded by shotgun-toting lobsterman, others just by the stories of such. Long Sands just isn’t one of them with plenty of room to find a peak.

Today, it’s an unseasonably warm February evening, so we head out to snag waves on wood. Scoring anything in the Northeast – frozen or fluid lines - is like wooing a temperamental lover. The mountains aren’t as dramatic as the west. Snowfall is erratic. Aside from autumn hurricanes, the surf usually depends on short windswell from tempests moving off the East Coast. And while winter offers intimate moments of deep passion, it can too often be a long, trying relationship that ends in bitter death. But everything about New England lends itself to tradition and old-world craft. This is the first place colonists settled in North America. And while the architecture may seem pubescent to Europeans, it exudes history by New World standards.

“You go into one antique store in an old barn and you’re melting from the sense of craftsmanship,” says Brad. “The fact that someone built that, with all that joinery, just to put his cows in. It’s inspiring.”

There’s a small get-together at the Grain shop later that night in aid of Mike’s sister-in-law’s birthday, and Jesse has driven out to the coast to join in. Over homemade cupcakes and microbrews, folks wander around the workshop to admire the boards, including a few that the Vans art department flew out from LA to make a week earlier.

Mike and Jesse are both bearded and clad in flannels, woolies and work pants – a functional uniform for the New England craftsman, whether building cabinets or snowboards. “I’m always discovering things that are incredible to me from the barns to boat builders tucked away in little pockets,” says Mike. “There’s one down the road who’s been building boats for thirty-five years. And he learned from a guy who built boats for thirty-five years before him. He’s using tools that are a hundred years old, passed on.”

“Many of our personal hand tools are these old antiques that we found in barns and cobbled together to keep alive,” Brad interjects. “We’re all inheritors of that aspect of quality, craftsmanship and care. Everywhere you look here, you just feel it.”

It’s a refrain uttered repeatedly. One customer even describes his Grain as having “the warmth of a living being”. And, as odd as that may sound, there may well be some truth in it. Alongside their commitment to life-cycle analysis - where they “interrupt the waste stream” to repurpose someone else’s trash – Grain are determined to pioneer a greener business model. Wood shavings are carefully collected and used as bedding for the animals on the farm. No employee of Grain commutes more than twenty minutes from the factory. Hand planes are finished with whey - a by-product of Vermont cheese as an alternative to polyurethane. And lumber off-cuts become ‘Sea Sleds’ or skateboards. They recently inked a deal with Fyne Boatworks, who will distribute Homegrown kits in the UK made of Douglas fir, ash, Larch and spruce from managed woodlands in England.

But things, they admit, are far from perfect. Even after carcinogenic foam has been cut out of the surfboard equation, the wood still has to be wrapped in something - and fibreglass is still the only option. They may have found an epoxy for their glassing process that emits zero volatile organic compounds, and a type of bioresin that’s thirty-five per cent organic, but in the spirit of transparency, the Grain website discloses each and every sticking point, in the hope that consumers will push them to up their game.

But if there’s one thing they’re proud of, it’s gotta be the wood. “We are unequivocal about using sustainably harvested wood,” says Brad of the Northern White Cedar from which they assemble the boards. “It’s been over-cut in other areas, but for us, it’s local and renewable. Human history is rife with examples of people thinking a resource would never run out and time has always proved that to be an error in judgement.”

Mike LaVecchia, Grain Surfboards

As midnight passes, the party turns into a cupcake war. Icing-coated revellers teeter homeward, but convening in the quiet office Brad, Jesse and Mike’s conversation turns toward the bigger picture.

“There’s a certain segment of the boardsports culture that’s going to be attracted to what we do, and what Jet does,” says Brad. “It’s not like it’s going to sweep the culture, sweep the industry or sweep public consciousness. But it’s not a novelty like, say, a coloured condom. There’s something real and meaningful here that a certain type of person is going to be attracted to like fine art, poetry, or anything that [is more than just] a manufactured plastic product.”

While a demand for hand-shaped surfboards has thrived, snowboarding, as Jesse points out, has been slower to catch up. It’s only now, after two decades of mass-production, that pockets of riders are visibly crafting their own sleds. But is the nature of wooden, handcrafted boards sustainable – in the real-world, economic sense of the word? Can ex-Burton employees run small businesses in a world where their former employer is growing bigger by the day, buying up brands like Channel Islands Surfboards, and energy drink companies have bigger media budgets than the media?

“It’s not much of a revolution as far as the industry is concerned. We don't have any interest in attacking them or what they do - we're only interested in offering choices that weren't really there before,” says Brad.

And people, it seems, are making the most of this freedom of choice. Even board-riding luminaries, like Portland snow anarchist Scotty Wittlake, are proponents of these companies. Ocean activist Dave Rastovich enjoyed his 5’10 Grain ‘Waka’ so much that he built a 6’10 ‘Radicle’ pintail on the lawn of the Billabong house at Pipeline. Kassia Meador and Mikey DeTemple came up and crafted a few. And seven-time world champ Layne Beachley helped design the 7’0 ‘Pandan’.

Is it possible that a generation who started out building their own ramps, ordering sticks from the local shaper and duct-taping hand-me-down snow gear are now looking for a way to re-access those roots? “People who are contacting me are into the whole concept of looking away from the Shaun White version of snowboarding – the over-the-top, branded, maniacal, sport. The board itself is a pretty aggressive ride, but it’s a lateral move,” says Jesse.

Consumer society has become so dependent on inexpensive plastic shit from Asia that we toss anything that has lost its appeal. It’s largely an American trait spread like a venereal disease from the US like polyethylene herpes. Planned obsolescence kills quality. Neither Jet nor Grain is looking to tear down the establishment. But maybe in addition to learning to grow our own food, supporting independent record labels, and fixing our own vehicles, more of us are looking for a way to reconnect with the most important objects in our lives.

“I don’t think what we do has much at all to do with the industry, marketability of surfboards or consumer patterns,” says Brad. “It’s far more of an act of creativity and passion that we’re involved in, the way a painter cares about creating a piece of art. I’m not saying we’re equivalent to some fine artist or anything, but it’s like that. You could have a hundred ways to decorate the inside of your house – a painting, sculpture, or photograph by someone who’s really trying to express something. That’s kind of what we’ve created - something that comes from the heart.”