Gabe Nevins was a teenager when he was cast to star in Gus Van Sant’s 2007 movie Paranoid Park through an open call put out to local skate shops in Portland, OR. He’d thought he was auditioning to be an extra, but, even with no experience, and perhaps because of his unselfconscious air, Van Sant liked him so much that he was offered the lead role of Alex, a young kid who accidentally murders a middle-aged security guard. The movie garnered a lot of acclaim, debuting at Cannes, and Nevins was anointed an unlikely teen heartthrob in magazines like NYLON and Teen Vogue.
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It seems that portraying a scared lost kid in trouble turned out to be somewhat prescient for Nevins..
It’s been rumored that things have not gone well for him, but few seem to know exactly what he’s been up to. The photographer Nick Haymes struck up and maintained a friendship with Nevins after shooting some press photos a few years ago and says that Nevins disappeared around the time of his 18th birthday. Nevins had spent time living on the street, sporadically reaching out to Haymes through Facebook and e-mail. They would intermittently spend time with each other, and Haymes would always make sure to snap photographs, even when Nevins was suffering through a bout of psoriasis that had left him with red pock marks all over his body. This March, Haymes released Gabe a collection of his photos of Nevins, collecting and tracing his life from his youth to his more troubled years as a young adult.
When I requested an interview with Nevins and Haymes to talk about the book’s release, Haymes told us it would be difficult to get in touch with Nevins because he was in jail, but assured me that he was heading down to L.A. to try to secure his release and would do his best to put us in touch. I sent some questions along, and Nevins responded to me just a few days later:
After interviewing Haymes and Nevins, it started to occur to me that I couldn’t completely ride for this book. Not because I thought Nevins’ role in the book wasn’t consensual—quite to the contrary, Nevins’ e-mail seemed to display a lot of affection for Haymes and for the photographs—but I just wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt being complicit in the fetishization of his demise. Artists like Van Sant have always found romance in sadness. Since My Own Private Idaho, one of actor River Phoenix’s last roles before dying of a drug overdose, he’s focused on the doomed lives of young men, forging a cinematic punk romance out of life in the gutter, that, in Phoenix’s case, came true, and that has countless moments in fashion, art, literature and music since. It’s the theme he continued with Nevins in Paranoid Park, the theme that made him a star. But what happens when life imitates art? By writing about this book myself, am I just perpetuating a media obsession that I don’t really support, that I don’t really believe does justice to the actual cost of a tough life?
![]()
Nevins assured me by e-mail that he loves Haymes’ photographs and was comfortable with them being published out in the world, and I decided that I have no reason not to believe him. “Nick is the father I never had….” he said in the e-mail. “All I’d like to say is I hope this book gets me somewhere I havent visited or places in my head I haven’t been.” And in a long interview, which we did decide to publish, Haymes seemed sweetly paternal, worrying about him like a dad and hoping for good things to come to Gabe’s life.
Tell me how you got to know Nevins? I was given a commission when I used to shoot for magazines. He was doing a skate movie and I photographed skateboarders and he’d seen some of the pictures online. He was was like Oh, super excited, You’ve taken my picture, I know your work. You know, it was that sort of relationship and regardless of age difference, we struck up a sort of good relationship because we had some common interests.
What is it about Nevins that you found interesting as a photographer? I suppose at a certain age, there was something a little bit mysterious about him that you couldn’t pin down. For me, as a photographer, I saw that. I was just very intrigued by him and I also wanted to do something real with my photography, very American-driven, and youth culture within the US was quite intriguing to me at that time, so he seemed like an ideal subject. He had all these situations happening to him in his life that made it a little more interesting a well. So that’s what first sort of drew me into him.
But then he sort of drifted out of commission for a little bit. When I started photographing him he was, what, 15, something like that? And then it was about his 18th birthday, or late 17, that things started to go a little wrong with him. And that’s when he took off and became homeless.
Are drugs a big part of it? I think so. I think—you know, you can pretty much guarantee it.
![]()
Were his parents around? It’s just his mother. His father isn’t alive, it’s just his mom. So, I knew them, I met them on set. I spoke with them. I said I wanted to take more pictures. I know how they feel, I’ve got children myself. My eldest is now 14, so when I first photographed Gabe, he was my son’s age. So the relationship does become quite challenging. Because you become a sort of role model, but then you’re also a friend, and then you’re mentor, so it becomes quite complex the longer you spend with someone. It wasn’t just a commission and then you leave the next day and you choose your pictures and it’s done with it.
So he looked up to you. You’ve got to have a certain amount of trust when you take pictures of somebody.
Did he have any inhibitions? He’s nude in a lot of the book. He’s an open person. I think he’s very welcoming. People like him very easily. He’s very charismatic and very charming, which is probably some of the reasons that he survived so well when he was living on the streets.
How did you maintain contact with him? He had a cell phone, and I wanted to make sure he still had contact so I used to send him money so he could get minutes. And then, I suppose, he’d run into an Apple store or a RadioShack in every town to use Facebook because that’s how people communicate these days. I don’t have a Facebook account, but my wife did and that’s how I eventually tracked him down. I had friends in LA and he used to always e-mail me and I saw he was online at the time and I was like, “Where are you?” And he told me where he was and I said, “Stay there and don’t move.” And I had someone literally drive out and pick him up and, you know, give him some food and shelter until I got there. And that’s how I managed to find him. We continued taking pictures, but you know, now he’s back in a tricky situation which I’m trying to figure out at the moment.
So you’re in the midst of it still. It’s quite odd, and then it’s odd when you’re trying to make an artist’s book out of a project that’s quite close to you because you have to really try and be respectful to people.
Do you ever worry that, since things aren’t great for Nevins, that this book could be viewed as exploitative? Always. I’m not that cold and callous. It always goes through my head. I wish you didn’t have to think about the consequences. But then it’s also my own sort of artistic statement and you can make what you want from the book. A lot of it doesn’t answer questions but sort of leaves it up for the viewer as well.
Why do you think this kind of subject matter continues to interest us? I’m afraid the darker side is always scarily romantic. No matter how bad the outcome is, there’s always that sort of romance with youth and darkness, a particular time in people’s lives, and outsiders in general, I think. It’s quite bad that it’s such a fashionable thing, but it just has that allure doesn’t it?
Is there a difference between romanticizing it and documenting it? I try not to romanticize when I’m taking photographs because I don’t think that’s always a good thing. But I’m also not cold and impartial, because you do form a relationship. So you tread on both grounds, I suppose.
![]()
What do you hope for Nevins? The last thing I want for him is to end up dead. I want the best for him and I hope he’s gonna figure it out. You know, you try not to think about the worst-case scenarios. At times during the project, of course, I did. But so far he’s okay and I hope he’s going figure it out and get on the right path. But ultimately, I can’t do that for him, you know, you can’t also hold hands. People do have to figure it out and get on with it.
source
You know that feeling you get when you’re so infatuated with someone that you could literally puke, and the only way to accurately express your megafeelings would be to cut the person open and live inside their ribcage? Well, Nick Haymes’s new book Gabe is the visual representation of that.
Some background info:
In 2007, a 14-year-old Gabe Nevins auditioned for the part of an extra in Gus Van Sant’s film Paranoid Park. A baby-faced skateboarder from Oregon, Van Sant was so enamored with Gabe that he impulsively cast him in the film’s lead role, playing a skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard. Soon after the film wrapped, Gabe met photographer Nick Haymes on an editorial shoot. Haymes, like Van Sant, instantly felt there was something special about Gabe (his long flowing locks and girlish features were clearly a powerful combo), and what was supposed to be an afternoon photoshoot turned into four years of obsessive documentation of Gabe’s life.
Haymes has made his career intimately documenting the lives of teenage misfits and skateboarders. Gabe, his third photo book, tells the unexpectedly tragic story of Gabe Nevin’s teen years. What begins as sensuous portraits of an innocent young star turns dark as we watch Gabe struggle with drug abuse, suffer an emotional breakdown, and eventually become homeless. The book is sad and sexy and weirdly romantic all at the same time—a devastating love affair that blurs the line between artist and subject, and makes you feel like a creepy voyeur in the best way possible.
![]()
After meeting Gabe on the editorial shoot, what made you want to keep photographing him?
Nick Haymes: There was just something about him that was a bit off… or dark. I couldn’t pin him down in just one picture. When I’m really intrigued by someone I don’t like to photograph them for just a day or a week—I want to find out more. Also, he lived in Oregon at the time and, being English, I always find it fun to travel America. I wanted to go and see what sort of life he had out there. So the whole thing started off pretty naive. I never knew the end result, but then, how could I?
Right, you could never predict Gabe’s future. But that was my main question—when Gabe’s life began to take darker turns, was there ever a point where you felt a moral obligation to stop taking pictures?
Yeah, I always struggle with it morally. But he liked being photographed, and he had done some acting and thought of it as being in a role. He has an exhibitionist quality, and I’ve always admired him for his freedom. But I was having moral issues again the other day, especially now that the book is launching and unfortunately he can’t be here.
Why not?
I don’t want to say exactly, but he’s going through a weird time in his life.
When I first looked at the book, not knowing much about you personally, I thought that maybe you and Gabe were in a sexual relationship. You can just sense an intense energy between you two in the photographs, and you capture such intimate moments, like him in the shower, or the photo of him in bed with another guy.
I know what you mean. I did become obsessed with him in some sort of manner, and I think you can have a loving relationship with a man you don’t want to sleep with. If you’re going to photograph someone for four years, you have to be in love with them; there has to be something that keeps you coming back. The relationship was quite weird—it was a friendship, but he didn’t have a father, so there was also a sort of father-son thing at points.
I think people can really relate to those obsessive feelings. Like when you’re in love with someone, and every little thing they do and every square inch of their body seems so profound. That photo in the book of just Gabe’s nipple really nails that obsessive feeling for me.
Yeah, you have to really fall for a person in every way possible. One thing that’s amazing about photographs is how fantastically they can express those feelings.
At one point while you were photographing Gabe he became homeless, right?
Yeah. I was sort of unaware, because our contact dipped in and out for a while. I was always trying to keep in contact by sending him money or a cell phone or something, and then suddenly whenever I talked to him on the phone he’d tell me all these stories about his life on the streets in LA, but I thought he was making them up. All of it sounded like fabrication from an actor. But then I went to visit him and he took me around Hollywood Boulevard, and showed me where he lived and slept, and he knew everyone out there on the streets who were also homeless. And then I thought, “Oh, fuck…” I was a bit shell-shocked.
Yeah, the physical changes he goes through in the book are pretty intense. At a point he suddenly has what look like red welts covering his entire body.
Those are from psoriasis. He always had little patches on him whenever we would do pictures, even at the beginning, but when he ran away from home it got way worse. I think it was related to the stress of being on the streets. I remember he was constantly washing himself, or getting himself into water, almost to the point of OCD. It was just burning him so much.
![]()
Before Gabe you released the book Zoloto, which was photographs of your two sons. There has been some mild controversy about them being naked in some of the photos.
Yeah… I was exhibiting those photos last year, and the gallery didn’t want to put them up because the walls were made of hardwood paneling, and they were like, “It’s a bit porno.” But the images are of my kids, and they don’t have anything to do with sex, but straight away people associate nudity with pornography. It’s a shame that it’s gotten to this point.
Yesterday, I was just re-watching those Calvin Klein TV ads from the 90s where people are being interviewed in front of hardwood paneling—do you remember those? They had this eerie sexiness to them, and they were SO amazing.
Yes, and they got banned straight away. It was the best marketing campaign Calvin Klein ever had.
Right, they were banned, but they would never have made it onto TV today. Times have changed.
Yeah, everything is so safe now, so sterile, so conservative. For example, my mother hates the way I photograph the children.
Is she religious?
Not really, she’s just British. She thinks it’s wrong and that the wrong people are going to be looking at them. I said, “Well, it’s a photo book, so the people who will be looking at it are people who are into art.” I was trying to make the distinction between art and porn. She said she didn’t want the book in her house.
For you, why is the nudity in the photographs of your children important?
Well, my kids always run around naked in the house. I’ve always wanted my kids to be really comfortable with nudity, and not to have any shame about their bodies. It’s only when you tell a kid “no” that something becomes taboo, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being naked—the whole family does it in the house. I’m a photographer, I take pictures every day, so I think if that’s how my kids behave naturally then I shouldn’t hide it.
Your first book, Between Dog and Wolf, intimately documents the lives of a group of teen skateboarders. How did that come about?
Well, they’re all non-professional skaters who I just met through friends. I started the project around 2005 when I was kicking around the west coast taking pictures. Then at some point one of them said, “Do you want to come and see where I’m from?” and told me he was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Well, only one thing came to mind when I thought of Tulsa, and that was Larry Clark, naturally. So I followed him there, and jeez, it was so fucked up.
I can only imagine.
The project I’m working on now is actually a continuation of that book. But since I started photographing those skateboarders, two of the kids from the project have died. One of them killed himself by jumping out a window, and one was shot in the back of the head. It was like a drug-related incident.
Wow, your subjects seem to have bad luck…
Yeah… I get really sad about it. For I while I was scared that I jinxed everyone I photographed.
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But I suppose you’re attracted to a certain type of person. It’s not like you’re searching for subjects in the Harvard University cafeteria.
I like outsiders for sure, because I end up relating to them quite a bit. That’s why I like skateboarders—it’s such an outsider culture, and it’s cheap to do, so it’s very working class. It’s not like snowboarding, which is for the wealthy. You can spend fifty bucks and can get a skateboard. They’re misfits, and I like that.
source
It seems that portraying a scared lost kid in trouble turned out to be somewhat prescient for Nevins..
It’s been rumored that things have not gone well for him, but few seem to know exactly what he’s been up to. The photographer Nick Haymes struck up and maintained a friendship with Nevins after shooting some press photos a few years ago and says that Nevins disappeared around the time of his 18th birthday. Nevins had spent time living on the street, sporadically reaching out to Haymes through Facebook and e-mail. They would intermittently spend time with each other, and Haymes would always make sure to snap photographs, even when Nevins was suffering through a bout of psoriasis that had left him with red pock marks all over his body. This March, Haymes released Gabe a collection of his photos of Nevins, collecting and tracing his life from his youth to his more troubled years as a young adult.
When I requested an interview with Nevins and Haymes to talk about the book’s release, Haymes told us it would be difficult to get in touch with Nevins because he was in jail, but assured me that he was heading down to L.A. to try to secure his release and would do his best to put us in touch. I sent some questions along, and Nevins responded to me just a few days later:
I just got out of jail. 2 months incarceration. So now I’m living in the back of a old ’80s van with a nice bed in the backyard of some land my friends own. Got the best sleep I’ve had my whole life last night, way better then a cement slab. It was pretty nice, caught up on some sleep since I’ve been homeless the last few years, never really found a home when I first stopped hitchhiking and left the gutter streets of SF. Some good things that have been going on is chasing tail, I’ve been locked up for awhile sharing a room with 6 people so I couldn’t even get a bloody wank in if I tried. I’m out for blood.
After interviewing Haymes and Nevins, it started to occur to me that I couldn’t completely ride for this book. Not because I thought Nevins’ role in the book wasn’t consensual—quite to the contrary, Nevins’ e-mail seemed to display a lot of affection for Haymes and for the photographs—but I just wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt being complicit in the fetishization of his demise. Artists like Van Sant have always found romance in sadness. Since My Own Private Idaho, one of actor River Phoenix’s last roles before dying of a drug overdose, he’s focused on the doomed lives of young men, forging a cinematic punk romance out of life in the gutter, that, in Phoenix’s case, came true, and that has countless moments in fashion, art, literature and music since. It’s the theme he continued with Nevins in Paranoid Park, the theme that made him a star. But what happens when life imitates art? By writing about this book myself, am I just perpetuating a media obsession that I don’t really support, that I don’t really believe does justice to the actual cost of a tough life?
Nevins assured me by e-mail that he loves Haymes’ photographs and was comfortable with them being published out in the world, and I decided that I have no reason not to believe him. “Nick is the father I never had….” he said in the e-mail. “All I’d like to say is I hope this book gets me somewhere I havent visited or places in my head I haven’t been.” And in a long interview, which we did decide to publish, Haymes seemed sweetly paternal, worrying about him like a dad and hoping for good things to come to Gabe’s life.
Tell me how you got to know Nevins? I was given a commission when I used to shoot for magazines. He was doing a skate movie and I photographed skateboarders and he’d seen some of the pictures online. He was was like Oh, super excited, You’ve taken my picture, I know your work. You know, it was that sort of relationship and regardless of age difference, we struck up a sort of good relationship because we had some common interests.
What is it about Nevins that you found interesting as a photographer? I suppose at a certain age, there was something a little bit mysterious about him that you couldn’t pin down. For me, as a photographer, I saw that. I was just very intrigued by him and I also wanted to do something real with my photography, very American-driven, and youth culture within the US was quite intriguing to me at that time, so he seemed like an ideal subject. He had all these situations happening to him in his life that made it a little more interesting a well. So that’s what first sort of drew me into him.
But then he sort of drifted out of commission for a little bit. When I started photographing him he was, what, 15, something like that? And then it was about his 18th birthday, or late 17, that things started to go a little wrong with him. And that’s when he took off and became homeless.
Are drugs a big part of it? I think so. I think—you know, you can pretty much guarantee it.
Were his parents around? It’s just his mother. His father isn’t alive, it’s just his mom. So, I knew them, I met them on set. I spoke with them. I said I wanted to take more pictures. I know how they feel, I’ve got children myself. My eldest is now 14, so when I first photographed Gabe, he was my son’s age. So the relationship does become quite challenging. Because you become a sort of role model, but then you’re also a friend, and then you’re mentor, so it becomes quite complex the longer you spend with someone. It wasn’t just a commission and then you leave the next day and you choose your pictures and it’s done with it.
So he looked up to you. You’ve got to have a certain amount of trust when you take pictures of somebody.
Did he have any inhibitions? He’s nude in a lot of the book. He’s an open person. I think he’s very welcoming. People like him very easily. He’s very charismatic and very charming, which is probably some of the reasons that he survived so well when he was living on the streets.
How did you maintain contact with him? He had a cell phone, and I wanted to make sure he still had contact so I used to send him money so he could get minutes. And then, I suppose, he’d run into an Apple store or a RadioShack in every town to use Facebook because that’s how people communicate these days. I don’t have a Facebook account, but my wife did and that’s how I eventually tracked him down. I had friends in LA and he used to always e-mail me and I saw he was online at the time and I was like, “Where are you?” And he told me where he was and I said, “Stay there and don’t move.” And I had someone literally drive out and pick him up and, you know, give him some food and shelter until I got there. And that’s how I managed to find him. We continued taking pictures, but you know, now he’s back in a tricky situation which I’m trying to figure out at the moment.
So you’re in the midst of it still. It’s quite odd, and then it’s odd when you’re trying to make an artist’s book out of a project that’s quite close to you because you have to really try and be respectful to people.
Do you ever worry that, since things aren’t great for Nevins, that this book could be viewed as exploitative? Always. I’m not that cold and callous. It always goes through my head. I wish you didn’t have to think about the consequences. But then it’s also my own sort of artistic statement and you can make what you want from the book. A lot of it doesn’t answer questions but sort of leaves it up for the viewer as well.
Why do you think this kind of subject matter continues to interest us? I’m afraid the darker side is always scarily romantic. No matter how bad the outcome is, there’s always that sort of romance with youth and darkness, a particular time in people’s lives, and outsiders in general, I think. It’s quite bad that it’s such a fashionable thing, but it just has that allure doesn’t it?
Is there a difference between romanticizing it and documenting it? I try not to romanticize when I’m taking photographs because I don’t think that’s always a good thing. But I’m also not cold and impartial, because you do form a relationship. So you tread on both grounds, I suppose.
What do you hope for Nevins? The last thing I want for him is to end up dead. I want the best for him and I hope he’s gonna figure it out. You know, you try not to think about the worst-case scenarios. At times during the project, of course, I did. But so far he’s okay and I hope he’s going figure it out and get on the right path. But ultimately, I can’t do that for him, you know, you can’t also hold hands. People do have to figure it out and get on with it.
source
You know that feeling you get when you’re so infatuated with someone that you could literally puke, and the only way to accurately express your megafeelings would be to cut the person open and live inside their ribcage? Well, Nick Haymes’s new book Gabe is the visual representation of that.
Some background info:
In 2007, a 14-year-old Gabe Nevins auditioned for the part of an extra in Gus Van Sant’s film Paranoid Park. A baby-faced skateboarder from Oregon, Van Sant was so enamored with Gabe that he impulsively cast him in the film’s lead role, playing a skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard. Soon after the film wrapped, Gabe met photographer Nick Haymes on an editorial shoot. Haymes, like Van Sant, instantly felt there was something special about Gabe (his long flowing locks and girlish features were clearly a powerful combo), and what was supposed to be an afternoon photoshoot turned into four years of obsessive documentation of Gabe’s life.
Haymes has made his career intimately documenting the lives of teenage misfits and skateboarders. Gabe, his third photo book, tells the unexpectedly tragic story of Gabe Nevin’s teen years. What begins as sensuous portraits of an innocent young star turns dark as we watch Gabe struggle with drug abuse, suffer an emotional breakdown, and eventually become homeless. The book is sad and sexy and weirdly romantic all at the same time—a devastating love affair that blurs the line between artist and subject, and makes you feel like a creepy voyeur in the best way possible.
After meeting Gabe on the editorial shoot, what made you want to keep photographing him?
Nick Haymes: There was just something about him that was a bit off… or dark. I couldn’t pin him down in just one picture. When I’m really intrigued by someone I don’t like to photograph them for just a day or a week—I want to find out more. Also, he lived in Oregon at the time and, being English, I always find it fun to travel America. I wanted to go and see what sort of life he had out there. So the whole thing started off pretty naive. I never knew the end result, but then, how could I?
Right, you could never predict Gabe’s future. But that was my main question—when Gabe’s life began to take darker turns, was there ever a point where you felt a moral obligation to stop taking pictures?
Yeah, I always struggle with it morally. But he liked being photographed, and he had done some acting and thought of it as being in a role. He has an exhibitionist quality, and I’ve always admired him for his freedom. But I was having moral issues again the other day, especially now that the book is launching and unfortunately he can’t be here.
Why not?
I don’t want to say exactly, but he’s going through a weird time in his life.
When I first looked at the book, not knowing much about you personally, I thought that maybe you and Gabe were in a sexual relationship. You can just sense an intense energy between you two in the photographs, and you capture such intimate moments, like him in the shower, or the photo of him in bed with another guy.
I know what you mean. I did become obsessed with him in some sort of manner, and I think you can have a loving relationship with a man you don’t want to sleep with. If you’re going to photograph someone for four years, you have to be in love with them; there has to be something that keeps you coming back. The relationship was quite weird—it was a friendship, but he didn’t have a father, so there was also a sort of father-son thing at points.
I think people can really relate to those obsessive feelings. Like when you’re in love with someone, and every little thing they do and every square inch of their body seems so profound. That photo in the book of just Gabe’s nipple really nails that obsessive feeling for me.
Yeah, you have to really fall for a person in every way possible. One thing that’s amazing about photographs is how fantastically they can express those feelings.
At one point while you were photographing Gabe he became homeless, right?
Yeah. I was sort of unaware, because our contact dipped in and out for a while. I was always trying to keep in contact by sending him money or a cell phone or something, and then suddenly whenever I talked to him on the phone he’d tell me all these stories about his life on the streets in LA, but I thought he was making them up. All of it sounded like fabrication from an actor. But then I went to visit him and he took me around Hollywood Boulevard, and showed me where he lived and slept, and he knew everyone out there on the streets who were also homeless. And then I thought, “Oh, fuck…” I was a bit shell-shocked.
Yeah, the physical changes he goes through in the book are pretty intense. At a point he suddenly has what look like red welts covering his entire body.
Those are from psoriasis. He always had little patches on him whenever we would do pictures, even at the beginning, but when he ran away from home it got way worse. I think it was related to the stress of being on the streets. I remember he was constantly washing himself, or getting himself into water, almost to the point of OCD. It was just burning him so much.
Before Gabe you released the book Zoloto, which was photographs of your two sons. There has been some mild controversy about them being naked in some of the photos.
Yeah… I was exhibiting those photos last year, and the gallery didn’t want to put them up because the walls were made of hardwood paneling, and they were like, “It’s a bit porno.” But the images are of my kids, and they don’t have anything to do with sex, but straight away people associate nudity with pornography. It’s a shame that it’s gotten to this point.
Yesterday, I was just re-watching those Calvin Klein TV ads from the 90s where people are being interviewed in front of hardwood paneling—do you remember those? They had this eerie sexiness to them, and they were SO amazing.
Yes, and they got banned straight away. It was the best marketing campaign Calvin Klein ever had.
Right, they were banned, but they would never have made it onto TV today. Times have changed.
Yeah, everything is so safe now, so sterile, so conservative. For example, my mother hates the way I photograph the children.
Is she religious?
Not really, she’s just British. She thinks it’s wrong and that the wrong people are going to be looking at them. I said, “Well, it’s a photo book, so the people who will be looking at it are people who are into art.” I was trying to make the distinction between art and porn. She said she didn’t want the book in her house.
For you, why is the nudity in the photographs of your children important?
Well, my kids always run around naked in the house. I’ve always wanted my kids to be really comfortable with nudity, and not to have any shame about their bodies. It’s only when you tell a kid “no” that something becomes taboo, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being naked—the whole family does it in the house. I’m a photographer, I take pictures every day, so I think if that’s how my kids behave naturally then I shouldn’t hide it.
Your first book, Between Dog and Wolf, intimately documents the lives of a group of teen skateboarders. How did that come about?
Well, they’re all non-professional skaters who I just met through friends. I started the project around 2005 when I was kicking around the west coast taking pictures. Then at some point one of them said, “Do you want to come and see where I’m from?” and told me he was from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Well, only one thing came to mind when I thought of Tulsa, and that was Larry Clark, naturally. So I followed him there, and jeez, it was so fucked up.
I can only imagine.
The project I’m working on now is actually a continuation of that book. But since I started photographing those skateboarders, two of the kids from the project have died. One of them killed himself by jumping out a window, and one was shot in the back of the head. It was like a drug-related incident.
Wow, your subjects seem to have bad luck…
Yeah… I get really sad about it. For I while I was scared that I jinxed everyone I photographed.
But I suppose you’re attracted to a certain type of person. It’s not like you’re searching for subjects in the Harvard University cafeteria.
I like outsiders for sure, because I end up relating to them quite a bit. That’s why I like skateboarders—it’s such an outsider culture, and it’s cheap to do, so it’s very working class. It’s not like snowboarding, which is for the wealthy. You can spend fifty bucks and can get a skateboard. They’re misfits, and I like that.
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