Wires Crossed

Ed Templeton is best known as a professional skateboarder and as the founder of the skateboard company Toy Machine, but he has maintained a serious photographic practice in parallel with his skating career for three decades, shooting on film wherever he travels and building a body of work that spans his domestic life in Southern California, skate culture, suburbia, and the margins of American life. Wires Crossed gathers work from across those years into a dense, diaristic sequence that resists easy summary: it is a document of a life lived in two worlds simultaneously, with photographs that range from tender domestic scenes to images of bodies, drugs, violence, and spectacle.

Templeton's photographs have been exhibited and published widely in the context of both skateboarding culture and contemporary art, and the book has introduced his photographic work to audiences unfamiliar with his skating.