Los Angeles Mid Seventies
Photographer : Hugh Holland
Hugh Holland first began photographing the skateboarders in southern California in 1975. His interest in photography had developed in the mid-sixties as a 20-year-old living in his native state of Oklahoma.
It wasn’t until after returning from a trip to Spain in 1968 and settling into what would become a career in West Hollywood as an antique finisher, that he began to seriously pursue the hobby. He made a dark room and began photographing everything that came into sight.
One afternoon in 1975, while driving up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Holland encountered his first skateboarders carving up the drainage ditches along the side of the canyon, and Holland knew he had found his subject. Although not a skateboarder himself, Holland never tired of capturing on film the beauty and grace of the burgeoning craze for the next three years. By 1978, the scene had become more commercial, and Holland’s documentation of the skateboarders came to its natural end.
represented by M+B gallery L.A
