CALIFORNIA CONCRETE: A LANDSCAPE OF SKATEPARKS

California is the birthplace of skateboarding culture and although the Skateparks are found all over the world today, these parks continue to thrive as the sport evolves and architects, engineers and Skaters collaborate to refine their designs. Artist Amir Zaki has grew up skateboarding, so he understands these spaces well and for years, he photographs the built and natural landscape of California and is passionate about large concrete structures. Not only in sculptural forms, but also as significant elements of the contemporary landscape, belonging to a tradition of public art and brutalist architecture. To create the images in this book, Zaki photographed in the light of dawn, climbing the interior of bowls and pipes in the absence of skaters. Each photograph is composed of dozens of photos taken with a mounted digital camera on a motorized tripod head. The appearance of the images obtained is unusual as Zaki's lens is more of a telephoto lens, which has the effect effect of flattening the space, but the shooting angle is often quite wide, which exaggerates spatial depth. The technology also allows Zaki to photograph certain areas from difficult positions that would be otherwise impossible to capture. In his text, Tony Hawk - one of the skateboarders world's most famous professionals - describes how photographs of Zaki's empty, open-air skateparks evoke memories of freedom idyllic feeling he felt when he visited a skatepark as a child in concrete pools and bowls. In his essay, architect Peter Zellner, based in Los Angeles, describes the beginnings of modern vertical skateboarding in the mid 1970s and the proliferation of purpose-built skateparks. It draws a parallel with the almost simultaneous reinvention of photography American landscape, when photographers looked away from the nature and focused on the man-made landscape. The remarkable Zaki's photographs of strangely supernatural skateparks, devoid of their users, inherit this tradition reinvented in finding beauty in a seemingly unnatural concrete suburb.