Icons: Free In The Streets

Photo courtesy of http://www.tbonephoto.com/

We all have our own iconic surf images tucked away in our memory, hot-wired to our hearts or sandblasted onto our souls. For some it may be that full rail split second of Michael Peterson from Morning Of The Earth; George Greenough's paradigm-shifting views from the tube; Peter Townend's layback cutttie or Tom Carroll's casual slash under the lip at Pipe. For me, it is a poster of an unidentified rider pushing through the cascading lip on a triple-stringered shooter at Dee Why Point sometime in the 70's. I don't own a copy of it but can see it clearly in my mind each and every time.

Back on land I have another set of images etched into my psyche, perhaps none more so than the Independent Trucks advert above first spotted in Skateboarder Magazine in 1980. Here Steve Olson's gravitationally low-centred monochromatic madness - as masterfully captured by photog Ted Terrebonne - was a veritable teenage coffin-nail in my previous surf-styled skating approach, one instantly supplanted by an urban ethos of urgency and aggression perfectly in tune with that then new decade and the trials and tribulations of high school.

I came across Steve's email in Juxtapoz magazine recently and and broadcast the following out into his ether:

'Low, fast, impending gyrational redirection with friction factored prior to weight redistribution. What else could a landlocked adolescent hope for? And there it was in print. No Bertlemann fro this time, nor Buttons' crazy quiff mid-snap in some some North Shore Kodak Reef moment. Instead: black and white, monochrome clarity and conformity confounded (at least in that instant). Reaching for the other side, across those lines, across the tracks, Nothing else required, solitude, four wheels and a whole damn universe to explore. On one's own terms. Salute.'

A hearty thanks to Ted Terrebonne for permission to reproduce his photo of Steve Olson.

For more of his magic please check out:

http://www.tbonephoto.com/

© felix ratcliff 2010