Dave Voelker, blasting ten feet out of the rickety, 8 foot high, AFA Socko quarterpipe in 1987. This photo ran in BMX Action, not sure what issue, in 1987. Dave was always one of the most fun riders to watch ride, in contests or just screwing around outside. His riding blew my mind many times. #steveemigphotos
This wasn't a traditional contest, it was a Guinness Book of World Records contest. Brian Blyther won the high air part, with a 10' 2" air, setting the first official world record high air. Everyone new it was close with Voelker's high air, but the judges gave Brian the win. But with my Pentax ME Super, which was pretty much idiot proof, I snapped this shot from across the way showing that Dave Voelker at what looks to be about 10' 2". Dave rode his whole career for GT, touring the U.S. and the world promoting GT and Dyno bikes, and freestyle itself, for 25 years or so. He was always one of the guys going the biggest, and one of the most exciting riders to watch.
There are two ways to great photos. You can shoot photos of something great. Or you can shoot great technical photos of something. Ideally, a good photographer continually improves their the technical skills, so they can, when the opportunity presents itself, shoot a technically great photo of something great. Then, in more controlled circumstances, they can shoot incredibly good technical photos of something that may not be great in of itself, but the quality of the photo makes it an amazing shot. Some of the most historic photos are those taken by average photographers that happened to be at the right place at the right time to capture a historic moment.
Technology always scared me, I never did learn how to use a light meter, for example. So I've always tried to take pretty good shots of things that are interesting by their nature. I got interested in shooting photos during a couple of weeks when we studied photography in 9th grade physics class. I was living in New Mexico at the time, and had a little, old, 126 box camera. I started trying taking cool photos with that. I remember shooting photos of a tortoise that wandered through our yard, next to a model car. I hand made a little road sign that said, "Nuclear Test Site 2 miles." The tortoise, in the photos was bigger than a car, a nuclear mutant. Those weren't very good, but it got me started trying to take interesting photos. At some point I upgraded to a Kodak 110 Instamatic, the vacation snapshot camera almost everyone owned in the 1970's and early 1980's. That's when I started looking through big photo books at the mall, and trying to take better photos, when I was about 14, as a kid in New Mexico, with the simplest of cameras.
Also snapped with my Pentax ME Super, this is Dave Vanderspek bombing down the Palm Springs Tramway road on his GPV in 1987. This photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy magazines. Andy, Lew, and Gork were big fans of Vander.
This was the first really big Gravity Powered Vehicle, or GPV race, in the summer of 1987. Unreel Productions shot video of the event, at 5:08 in this clip. GPVing was the little side sport to BMX and freestyle. It was first started by BMX guys, bombing down local hills on bikes with no pedals or chains, built from the spare bike parts in the garage. A few different groups got into GPV's. By this race, fairings had entered the picture, giving a huge advantage on this long, steep, relatively straight road outside of Palm Springs. But NorCal BMX legend, and Curb Dogs head guy, Dave Vanderspek went with the helmet, leathers, and his supertuck body technique.
I'll be honest, this photo was pure luck. It was only the second roll of film where I tried to shoot panning shots. With my Pentax, and its stock 50 mm lens, I could set the frame speed I wanted (1/15th or 1/30th of a second here, I forget), and it would automatically set the F-stop for the lighting conditions. At this event, BMX racer Tommy Brackens actually passed the video camera motorcycle, in a turn, and the motorcycle was doing 85 mph. Pat Wallace, the cameraman facing backwards on that motorcycle, told me this himself. These guys were hauling ass.
But I shot this photo within 100 yards of the starting line, and Vander was maybe doing 20 mph at this point. But the helmet came out sharp, and the panning worked well, and gave the impression of the real speeds the GPV racers were hitting that day. This photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Wizard Publications two shot magazine, Homeboy. I had three or four photos, on the roll of 36, that came out about as good as this shot. Those guys loved this shot, since it was Dave Vanderspek, and used it in all three magazines, months after I'd been laid off there. Even BMX Plus! photographer John Ker complimented me on this photo, and John is a seriously technical photographer who has shot thousands of photos. If he says, "Great photo," that's a serious compliment in the BMX world.
Eddie Fiola (front), and Chris Lashua, practicing synchro wedge ramp stalls, while taking a break from doing shows at the World's Expo in Vancouver, over the summer of 1986. #steveemigphotos
I shot this photo in the little town square area of Whistler, British Columbia. At the time, they were just starting to promote the idea of mountain bikers riding trails at ski resorts during the summer. Honestly, that seemed like a stupid idea to me, at the time. There were hardly any mountain bikers, even up in the mountains, in 1986. The sport hadn't really taken off then. Obviously, I was wrong, and now things like this happen right there in the center of Whistler, where this and the next photo were snapped.
I flew up to Boise, Idaho, then rode up to this contest in the summer of 1986 with former freestyle teammate Justin Bickel, and his parents. They were my "freestyle family" for the first year and a half that I got seriously into BMX freestyle. This was a great week of riding fun, where I met a bunch of Canadian freestylers, Rob Dodds and Rob Thring, among them. The BMX Worlds were being held in Whistler that weekend, and they held an amateur freestyle contest as well. The BMX Worlds were kind of a joke then, and most racers stayed in the States to race ABA points races that weekend. The only pros in Whistler were Stu Thompsen and Greg Hill, as I remember.
Us freestylers just sessioned all day, and half of the night that whole week. The Canadians taught Justin and me to play "Touchdown," which is bascially hockey-like slams on a BMX bike. We'd all ride around and run into reach other, trying to get the other guys to touch a foot, or their whole body, on the ground. The last guy still on the pedals was the winner. There were some pretty solid slams happening during that. It's a whole different kind of bike riding, Canadian-style, eh..
Out of nowhere, the GT/Brittania motorhome rolled into Whistler one day. Out popped Eddie Fiola and East coast pro, Chris Lashua. They hung out for two or three days, before heading back to Vancouver, where they were doing shows. I snapped the photo above, and the one below, while Eddie and Chris were riding, practicing and just goofing around. Both of these photos ran in the summer tour article in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, while I was working there. They had no photos of Chris Lashua, so I showed them mine from earlier that summer, and these two made the cut.
Eddie Fiola rose to prominence at the very beginning of BMX freestyle as the first King of the Skateparks. He toured with GT for years, and then got into doing stunts in the TV and film industries. For years now he's worked as a stunt coordinator. But he still rides freestyle regularly.
Chris Lashua with a small ramp flipper, a front wheel 180 while hanging the back wheel over the top of the ramp. Whistler, BC, summer of 1986. #steveemigphotos
Chris ran the GT/Mountain Dew trick team on the East Coast for years in the 1980's. He went on to perform for both Ringling Bros. Circus, and then was a performer for Cirque du Soleil for many years, performing in the German Wheel. After that, he started a business building equipment for circuses. Several years ago, he and some friends founded Cirque Mechanics, which he runs and performs in still.
I had a couple of more photos published in the magazines, I think. After working for BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', I wound up contributing a photo or two, or an article or two, to all six BMX magazines of the 1980's, including BMX Plus! and Super BMX, and both of their freestyle magazines, as well as one issue of Homeboy. For most of 1987, I shot all the photos for the AFA newsletter, as well, but few copies of those have survived, so those photos are gone, except for one of Eddie Fiola I've seen on the web and social media.
I never became a great technical photographer, I still struggle with pretty basic technology, of all kinds, in the days when everyone shoots photos nearly every day. But I still love shooting photos, I have a pretty good eye, and get some cool shots now and then. I'm stoked I got a handful of photos published back in the 1980's, especially because I became a video guy, and shot a lot more video than still photos. I still see myself as some kid from Idaho who somehow stumbled into the BMX industry, and wound up seeing a lot of amazing stuff happen in the early days of BMX freestyle. I caught a little bit of that on film and video, along the way.
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform called Substack, designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
This is my favorite selfie, from February of 2020. The bear logo was on a construction truck I was walking by. My nickname, "The White Bear," came from a poem I wrote, after getting dumped by a girlfriend in 1988. I published it in a poetry zine in 1992. My roommate at the time kept calling me "The White Bear" after reading the zine, and the name stuck. It IS NOT a racist thing. White supremacy is a complete crock of shit, and I want nothing to do with it. Cool people come from all kinds of backgrounds, and so do assholes. Race, religion, nationality and all that have little to do with it. It's just an old nickname that stuck, and was better than Empig, my nickname throughout my grade school years.
If' you're reading this blog post, you've probably just seen one of the NFT's I put out, and are wondering who I am. Most of the people who have read this blog since 2017 are from the Old School BMX freestyle world of the 1980's or 1990's. That's where I come from. Here are the basics about me.
If you want to know about my early life, this post tells you the basics:
I'm 55 years old, homeless, and now living on the East end of the San Fernando Valley, just over the hill from Hollywood, California. I landed back here in Southern California 2019, and was selling my Sharpie art (or trying to) on Hollywood Boulevard, until Covid hit in early 2020. I was in North Carolina, and then Richmond, Virginia, for nearly 10 years, late 2008-2019.
I grew up in Ohio as a kid, lived in Carlsbad, New Mexico for a year (1980-81), then went to high school in Boise, Idaho (1982-84). I lived in San Jose, California for a year (1985-86), before getting a jobBMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, at age 20, in Torrance. I lived in SoCal from 1986-2008, most of the time in and around Huntington Beach.
Here's me balancing on my Skyway T/A bike, summer of 1985, at the Boise Fun Spot, where I worked. Yeah, I thought OP cord shorts were cool then. I was wrong.
Since I'm homeless now, I have to say that I don't take any drugs, prescription or recreational, and I don't drink any alcohol at this point. I've been struggling in and out of homelessness since I started working as a taxi driver in late 1999. I quit the taxi business when it was dying in 2007, though I worked again driving a cab in North Carolina (where my family now lives) in 2011-12, until my dad had a stroke.
I'm weird and creative enough naturally, I don't need alcohol or drugs. I'm 100% pro legalization for weed, OK, now it's called cannabis. I was a social drinker until a couple years into my taxi driving career, in the mid- 2000's. I worked 7 days a week, and couldn't drink, while driving 12-18 hours a day. I drove drunk people home in the cab every single night. I just got sick of alcohol, and drunk people, and stopped drinking. I don't care if you do, I just stopped. It doesn't help me, and I feel like shit the day after any drinking even a few beers, so I quit.
At this point, I'm primarily known as a blogger and Sharpie artist that came out of the Old School BMX freestyle world of the 1980's. I invented a style of drawing with Sharpie markers that I call Sharpie Scribble Style. I came up with this technique while actually living in an indie art gallery in Anaheim, called AAA Electra 99, in 2005-6. Here's one of my better pieces, that was used as an art show flyer in 2017.
This Kurt Cobain drawing appeared in the one, small, solo art show I did. That was at Earshot Music, a really cool, old school music shop, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I was living at the time. The show was in early November of 2017.
Since getting serious with this style of drawing, in November of 2015, I've sold around 90 originals, and 120 or so "prints," which were actually high quality color copies. With help from friends in Scandinavia and Europe/U.K., my work has made it to 6 of the 7 continents. I need to find an art collector in Antarctica, and on the International Space Station, to be truly global. Those aren't my priorities right now, but I'll get there someday.
When taxi driving died in 2007, due to the new technology of computer dispatching, I wound up fully living on the streets for a year. I literally went from working 80-100 hours one week to homeless the next.
In November 2008, I accepted my family's offer to fly me to North Carolina, where they wound up living years after I moved out. I got stuck in NC for ten years. Other than taxi driving, I could not find ANY "real job" there, and lived with my parents, or in homeless shelters, most of the time. I started selling my Sharpie drawings just to have a little income, not knowing if anyone would actually buy them. It turns out, they do sell, but not for enough money to actually make a living.
These 18" X 24" Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, (like the one above) take 40-45 hours each to draw, I work from photos, and I've sold the last 40 or so drawings for $150 to $200, for the originals. My prints usually go for $20, though they have sold for more in Scandinavia and Europe.
When I'm bored, (which isn't often, I usually work 7 days a week at blogging and art), I do black and white Sharpie "doodle" drawings. These are just for fun, I've never sold any, and often have some words or message in them. I've drawn over 100 of these. I consider these just goofing around, and draw them when my brain is tired from doing other things.
My blogging started in 2008, when I landed in my parents' small apartment, in tiny Kernersville, North Carolina. Bored out of my skull, and unable to find a job as the Great Recession economic collapse happened, I started "surfing the web" on my parents' computer, as we used to call it. In a couple of weeks, I started blogging about my days as a mediocre BMX freestyler, and BMX/skateboard industry guy, in the 1980's and 1990's. I'm really a writer at heart, and I had already published more than 40 zines in my life, so blogging was a natural for me. I was a Luddite until 2008, just getting online to check email or do a Google search now and then. Since 2008, I've tried over 25 different blog ideas, written over 2,400 total blog posts, and raked in over 440,000 page views across all of my blogs. Here's a post that goes into more detail about that.
I've been homeless nearly the whole time since June 2017. Three times I had a room for a couple of months each time, thanks to friends and Covid gig worker unemployment. Living with my mom in NC was a toxic situation, and I just had to leave in 2017. I've scraped by as a Sharpie artist since, surviving as a homeless, but working, artist. A bunch of people, mostly from the BMX world, have helped me along the way at different points.
Homelessness is a hard thing to get out of, particularly when you are simply trying to work your way out of it, solo, like I am. I literally work, as much as possible, all day, every day, either blogging, promoting and building my social media presence (Google #sharpiescribblestyle), and just doing what I have to in order to survive day to day. That means panhandling when I run out of art money. I have done a ridiculous amount of creative work while homeless, and my main goal is to just get to where I can make a decent living, and rent a basic, one bedroom apartment, from my creative work.
Why don't I have a "real job?" Simple answer is that between being really overweight now, and not having a job history anymore, there's no "real job" I could get that would pay enough for me to rent a place to live. I worked 35 hours a week at a restaurant in 2002-3, while homeless, and it took me 9 months to save up $300 to get a new taxi permit, so I could go back to driving a cab. Working minimum wage while homeless just makes the homelessness permanent, unless someone will give you a room for free for several months. AND it's just miserable. Most people don't realize that pretty much every homeless program relies on the homeless person NOT working a job, to get EBT (food stamps) and housing. If you make more than about $300 working, you get kicked off of all aid. Really. The people that go through homeless programs usually wind up scamming Social Security Disability, and getting housing, medical, and food, paid for by your tax dollars, forever. There are probably 6-10 million people living this way right now. For real.
One other thing I've been doing since 2019 is shooting photos on the streets. An old BMX friend, Steve Crandall, gave me his old iPhone 5, and that's been my camera for two years now. So I have this big collection of photos of the weird stuff you see as a homeless person, which I'm beginning to publish under the hashtag #SEstreetlife. I'll start blogging about this project soon. Here's one pic.
This is two young guys pushing a $250,000+ Rolls Royce Dawn, at 3 am, because their friend ran it out of gas. For real. You see weird shit when you're out on the streets of L.A. county 24/7 (or anywhere). #steveemigphotos, #SEstreetlife
If you got down to this point in the post, you probably just heard of me, and are wondering if my weird NFT's are worth paying for. I can't answer that, you'll have to figure that one out for yourself. But There are over 700 blog posts in this blog alone, that may help, and probably another 500 posts I've written elsewhere online (see the "Addicted to blogs" link above). I deleted about 1,200 blog posts in 2012, everything I'd written online, when I got depressed, after my dad died.
I heard about NFT's a few months ago, in an article about a musician, and recently started digging in and researching the subject. The more research I do, the more I realize that this technology is going to be around a long time, and that right now is a moment that only comes once for a movement like this. So I'm going to be creating NFT's, of photos, Sharpie art, and maybe other things, for a long time to come.
Does that mean you can make a quick 10X or 20X flip on them? I don't know, that's for you to figure out. I'll be putting most of my work out pretty cheap, by NFT standards, under $200+ gas fees in most cases. And I'll throw a few NFT's out super cheap now and then. The first couple I put out at a high price, and a few of the more prominent future NFT's will cost more as well. I have a 35 year track record of all kinds of creative work, and I really need to get my fat, ugly ass into an apartment. So I hope you make a killing flipping my NFT's so I can keep creating cool shit. I also cuss too much for some people. If that bothers you, don't buy my stuff, there's more than enough other NFT's out there to check out.
I'm on Twitter: @steveemig43 , and I have an Intagram account: @steveemig43, but don't really use it anymore. I LOVE Pinterest, and I'm there at Steve Emig. Here's my Pinterest page. I have tons of boards, including 170+ photos of my #sharpiescribblestyle art, and the new #SEstreetlife photo board, and a bunch more. I'm learning the NFT world with my photos, Sharpie art will enter the mix sometime later. I also have a bunch of old BMX IP I own, but I won't do anything with that until talking to the riders involved. First I need to get a place to live, and stabilize my life, and learn the NFT world. I haven't joined Discord yet, mostly because I'm one guy, I have limited time online until I get an apartment, and I just don't have time for it, yet.
As a BMX and skateboard industry guy in the 1980's and 1990's, I saw a lot of really cool stuff happen in person. This clip below is footage I shot in the spring of 1989, at a 2-Hip King of Vert contest in Canada. You may recognize the rider at 14:43 in the clip, where he pulls a new trick for the first time ever.
This is from the 2-Hip Ride Like a Man video, which came out in 1990, and was produced and edited by Eddie Roman, who is also doing the funny commentary, for Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip.
So if you've never heard of me, I hope this post helped you learn the basics, and figure out if you think my NFT's have any promise. My blogs and work can be a rabbit hole, especially if you did any BMX riding or skating in your younger days. Hit me up on Twitter with questions or comments. Later.
Here's Windy Osborn speaking, with a great intro by racing legend Cheri Elliot, after being inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame in 2012. You can check out (and buy) Windy's classic, fine art, freestyle and other prints at windyosborn.com .
On on Thursday evening, the last day of July 1986, I flew from San Jose, California to LAX airport in Los Angeles with my bike, a Skyway T/A, a suitcase, and $80 in my wallet. I got picked up there by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Craig "Gork" Barrette. Officially, I started work the next day, Friday August 1st. I was starting the job that changed the entire course of my life, working at Wizard Publications. Wizard was the long time publisher of BMX Action magazine, and for two years then, the first BMX freestyle magazine, FREESTYLIN'. Somehow my zine, San Jose Stylin', got me the job there. That still amazes me. I was 20 years old, and so nervous that I actually got the hives a couple days before leaving the Bay Area. I wore long sleeve shirts to work for two weeks to hide the hives, and the guys made fun of me for that a little.
Although my start date was Friday, Gork drove us all in his van straight back the the office from LAX. As luck would have it, that Saturday was the ten year anniversary party for BMX Action. At the small warehouse building that housed Wizard, I followed Gork up onto the big industrial shelving racks in the back. Our job for the night was to go through a bike box full of little yellow boxes, each close to the size of a cigarette pack. Those boxes held color slides of photos shot by Bob "Oz" Osborn, his daughter Windy, and probably a few other contributors over the ten years. Gork and I were to find 100 of the best photos for a slide show ot play at the party. At his core, Oz was a photographer, and Windy grew up going to BMX races with Oz and her BMX racing brother, R.L.. She picked up a camera, following in her father's footsteps, and Windy began as a girl with a camera in a boy's sport, and worked her way up to legendary photographer in the BMX and freestyle worlds.
When I started at Wizard, Windy was the staff photographer for both magazines. Oz had moved on to spending most of his time out in the wild somewhere shooting fine art photos. As Andy Jenkins explained it to me then, "Oz is here (at the office) about one week a month, and the rest of the time he's out in his van taking Ansel Adam-type pictures of trees and flowers." The van was a highly decked out 4WD van, made for getting to out of the way places and camping for days while shooting nature photos.
Officially, my job was "editorial assistant" for both magazines, meaning Andy, Lew, and Gork could all boss me around. They were all cool, by and large, though we had our different views on things. In reality, my main job was to proofread both magazines, and fix every single little spelling and grammatical mistake. At 20 years old, armed only with my Boise High School diploma, I was taking over for Don-Boy, a guy with an English degree. Hey, no pressure. Andy, Lew, and Gork waited until a couple of days before deadline to start writing most of their articles, and so I ended up proofreading every single word of both magazines over about four days, right before, and after, deadline.
The rest of the month, driving Windy to photo shoots was one of my consistent jobs. Sure, Windy could driver herself, obviously. But having me deal with getting directions, keeping the Astro van gassed up, picking up film, (remember film?) and around to help out when needed on shoots, allowed Windy to focus more on her job, taking great photos. While Andy, Gork, and Lew were officially my bosses, Windy was more like a veteran co-worker. Once we had photo shoots scheduled, she expected me to handle the logistics, to get her to the right place to shoot the right rider or skater, and she was ready to find the best angles and backdrops to snap killer shots. Working with Windy was the biggest thing I was looking forward to when I found out I got the job in July of '86.
Epic Windy photo of Brian Blyther high above the Enchanted Ramp, 1987. For pure ego reasons, this is a favorite of mine, because on the deck, left to right, are Steve Broderson, Mike Golden, Todd Anderson, Me (standing), and Mat Hoffman. Prestige by proximity. This photo just makes me look way cooler than I ever was. I did judge that contest, though, which is why I was up there. Again, you can buy her prints at windyosborn.com.
But working with Windy wasn't like working with just some random person at another job. First of all, Windy was hot (and still is, of course). Second, she was a handful of years older than me, and I was a 20-year-old, deathly shy guy, still a virgin, and completely inept at talking to women, let alone hot women. I always kind of felt like a high school freshman who somehow got the job of driving the head cheerleader around, and I never knew what to say. Since I was always afraid of saying or doing something stupid around Windy, I did exactly that on a pretty frequent basis. So for a while, it seemed the only thing I was good at was pissing Windy off. On more than one occasion, I took a wrong freeway ramp, which instantly costs you 15-20 minutes in Southern California traffic. It's a huge and confusing area, I was new to it, and wasting time driving really bugged Windy. She traveled most weekends for work, and, unlike me, actually had a social life. She took as long as necessary to shoot photos, but didn't like wasting time traveling to and from shoots. She wanted to get back to the office and then head home at a reasonable time. In addition, I'd forget something once in a while, or made some little mistake that bugged her. I also learned, the hard way, of course, that riders who don't have cars tend to give really shitty directions to places. Following those directions often wasted more time. But in time, I got my shit together more, and things went smoother.
I landed at Wizard fresh from 11 months working at a Pizza Hut. It was typical restaurant work, if you do the job well, you're busy every minute, and there is no down time. There's a list of things to get done to clean and close, as well as lots of pizzas that had to be made. I was the shift supervisor, and in charge of closing every night, with a couple workers to boss around. The summer before that, I managed the Boise Fun Spot, a tiny amusement park (carnie street cred!) where I had 12 employees under me, and had to make sure everything got done day to day. I was used to being in charge, having a bunch of responsibility, and a ton of things to do, and planning and organizing things. I'd been doing low level management at pretty traditional jobs. I was used to cracking the whip on other people, being in charge, not doing much creatively, and feeling that if I wasn't constantly busy, I wasn't earning my money.
Then came Wizard. It was a highly successful family business, all about creativity and making an amazing, visually stimulating product, I was the new guy,and not the boss of anything. Even Cosmo, the Factory Watch Cat, could boss me around, but he was chill and never did. There was a lot of down time. As cool as it was, I struggled with not being busy all the time.
Looking back from 33 years later, and lots of personal and creative growth since, I realize that I was both a Blocked Artist, and a Shadow Artist. Both of those terms I learned of in Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, which I highly recommend for anyone creative. A Blocked Artist is someone who has a strong creative drive, but also has deep seeded beliefs that it's bad or arrogant to do art. Blocked artists routinely put down other artists, and sabotage their own creative work. There's a continuous inner struggle between the part of them that wants to do creative work, and the part that honestly believes it's bad or wrong to be creative. Those negative beliefs are usually instilled in them as children, and sometimes by religious beliefs, or both.
A Shadow Artist is a highly creative person, often blocked as well, who somehow works themselves into proximity of other "officially" creative people. A Shadow artist might paint cool pictures, but downplay their creativity, and talk up their older brother, a talented musician, the family member everybody knows is highly creative. Hiding in the shadows of another artist lets you off the hook for not really producing what you're capable of. The TV and film production world is filled with Shadow Artists working around the famous actors, directors, and writers, but with dreams of their own. When I worked in the box office of Cirque du Soleil, there were a lot of Shadow Artists there, as well.
So I was a young guy, incredibly afraid of actually using my own creativity, suddenly driving Windy Osborn to photo shoots. She was a professional, seasoned, published monthly, veteran photographer by then.
Looking back from today's knowledge, the biggest thing I really learned from Windy was that it's actually OK, and possible, to be a professional creative person.
I grew up as a kid in rural and small town Ohio, very conservative in the old school, and non-political, sense of that word. People did things they way they'd always been done, and change happened very slowly. The adults in my childhood mostly worked factory jobs they didn't really like. People didn't have "passions," they had hobbies done in their spare time. It was simply known that it was impossible to make a living as an artist, of any kind, so it didn't even need to be said. "Artists" were those weird, crazy, lazy (and usually gay, it was believed) people in New York City and L.A. No one wanted their kid to ever be one. It was simply something that was not done. Period. Coming from there, I didn't take "art" seriously, and that's something I struggled with for years, and still struggle with, even after 35 years of doing many kinds of creative work. (Here's my "creative resume'.")
While I also worked with Andy, Lew, and Gork, we all did most of our creative work alone, in our offices. Windy was the first real working artist I ever worked with, and got to watch in action. Once we got to a photo shoot, I mostly just hung out and watched. What I was watching, I realize now, was a real, functional, professional artist, for the first time. The creative process is something completely different than the list of things to clean that I had in my head as Pizza Hut employee, or the timed world of running carnival rides.
Creative work is largely fun, often playful. It doesn't seem like work, which really makes a Blocked Artist feel guilty. You try different things. Some work, some don't. Ideas pop up out of nowhere, and you give them a shot. You're not on a time clock. You take the time necessary to get a good angle, work with the lighting available, and find cool backdrops to make the photo look even better, when possible. Andy, Gork, Lew, and I used to joke that we knew every weird colored wall within ten miles of the Wizard offices. "Got a photo shoot with Martin Aparijo in his yellow GT uniform?" There's that blue tile wall over on (whatever)street." That'll make the yellow really pop. That was a normal thing.
Windy was always in charge, she knew the technical aspects of photography, and she had her vision and ideas for each shoot, and the riders, and me, collaborated with her to make it happen. That was a huge difference from my mindset, and while it was fun, it wasn't really "work" in my mind, and I was always struggling with the idea that I really wasn't "doing things right," because of my inner battle with doing art and creative work. So I was about as uptight as could be back then, which is probably the main reason I didn't last long working there. Well, that and I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. Plus let's face it, Spike Jonze wound up permanently replacing me, and Spike meeting up and working with Andy, Lew, Gork, and Windy was destined to be. I'm pretty sure the Universe had that planned eons ago.
While I never did learn to actually work a light meter (I didn't need to with my Pentax ME Super), my photography definitely improved by working with Windy. For the year after leaving Wizard, I was the writer and photographer for the AFA Newsletter. My shots never equaled Windy's (though my panning Vander GPV shot was in the ball park), I went on to do my own photo shoots, and lots and lots of good video shoots, in the next several years. From Windy Osborn, I learned what a working artist, a photographer in her case, looks like, and how they go about things, and how they collaborate, and strive to create something great. So thanks a lot for that Windy.
While Windy grew up in a creative family, in highly creative Southern California, and in a new and growing and evolving sport, BMX racing and freestyle, I came from a part of the country that bought art, but hated the people who made it. I always found that amazing. Most small town people go to church on Sunday to worship God, The Creator. But those same people hate highly creative people. That's one of those weird paradoxes of religion. The struggle to undo those early years of prejudice against artists has led to many years of finding and working with my own creative process. Working with Windy back in 1986, and having to write for real magazines, I now realize, was a big part of getting that process started.
My memories of those shoots I went on with Windy are spotty. I remember little pieces. Windy on her stomach to shoot Don Brown's shove-it, on the Huntington Beach Pier. Joking around with Ron Wilkerson and Windy on the short drive to shoot the original abubaca sequence. Watching Windy shoot a few angles of a cool looking lawnmower variation Frank Garrido did, on a side street, in front of this gnarly, industrial looking building. Taking Martin Aparijo to "the gray wall" for a Miami hop-hops shoot, only to find the shadow was perfect on the wall, shading the wall but not the sidewalk. Windy was super excited about that shadow, which I didn't think was too big of a deal at the time. Now it makes more sense, it was a bit of synchronicity. Then, on the concrete area next to The Spot at the Redondo Beach Pier, she shot Rodney Mullen, and I did a mini-interview of him (December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'), and I talked both of them into shooting a sequence of Rodney's one footed rocket ollie trick. Neither of them thought it was worth shooting, but I had the feeling that day. The sequence made the magazine.
Then there's the time we did a shoot with Chris Day, just before dusk, on a big, slippery, concrete circle thing in Huntington Beach. I was goofing around on the Wizard shop scooter, doing power slides, while Windy snapped pics of Chris. After the shots of him, Windy said, "Hey, let me see that again," talking about my slides. It was a scooter, but it was also the only time I got to ride something in front of Windy's lens. She got this great shot of me doing a one footed, sideways power slide, back foot off the ground, totally leaned into it, with the back peg on the scooter scraping on the ground. That shot almost made it into FREESTYLIN', in an 80's scooter article. I was stoked, even though it was on a scooter. Then Andy J. called me into his office. "Steve, that shot of you on the scooter makes scooters look cool... and we just can't have that." Andy, Lew, and I laughed. But I was bummed. I really wanted a shot of me riding... something... in FREESTYLIN'. It didn't happen. But I did manage to get to do one little spontaneous photo shoot with Windy, and that's a great notch on the BMX life belt.
Everyone who has a creative drive, also has a long journey in front of them, to discover their own creative process, and what mediums work best for them. There are a lot of ups and downs on that journey, but those ups and downs are where the art comes from. So follow your intuition, find your own path, and keep creating and keep learning.
Here's another great photo by Windy, from the era when I worked there. Who else could make a lawnmower look this fucking cool. Windy snap of Ceppie Maes. Again, you can check out and buy her prints at windyosborn.com.
Wow, I made it through a big, long post without mentioning Windy's
boobs... which happened to be the title of the first blog post of mine
that went viral in the Old School BMX world, way back in 2008. It was a
good little story, but I hadn't learned the limits of what you can and
cannot write about, concerning other people's lives. Sorry about that
one Windy. But I've managed to write close to 1,000 other BMX stories in
the last ten years, that didn't piss Windy off, like the "boobs" post did. So that's good.
Check out my new mash-up "book/blog thing" about the future:
Top photo, downtown Richmond, looking from the Mayo Bridge over part of the James River. In the photo above, the little blotch near the top of the tree is an osprey. They're big raptors, hawk-type birds, with wingspans of about 5 feet, that catch fish in the river. Ospreys carry those fish headfirst, aerodynamically. No other bird got the aerodynamic memo. I need a better zoom, (or a real camera), this is the best I could do. You can see ospreys in early mornings, flying over the river near the Mayo bridge, looking for a fish breakfast. There's really cool bird watching there, which includes, cormorants, Canada geese, great blue herons, vultures, and a bald eagle or two, if you're lucky. I'm surprised there aren't more wildlife photographers on the Mayo (and other) bridges catching the action in the mornings.
As an old school, HAS BEEN BMX guy, "squirrely" is a term we used for people who don't pedal smoothly. When sketchy BMX bike riders die, they probably go to the Squirrely Gates. But people here can just go to a game at The Diamond, to go through them.
Also as an old BMX/skateboard guy, I'm always watching the local sticker culture. It's a low key form of street art to people like me, and seldom noticed vandalism to most. I've seen a few of these stickers around town, and I think it's funny AF. Finally got a pic of one downtown.
More from my photo taking hike around the Shockhoe Bottom area of downtown Richmond, Virginia last weekend. The building in the center is the Main Street train station, one of Richmond's big redevelopment projects in recent years. I liked the porcupine staple pole texture in the left side to frame it. Main Street Station is really cool inside, check it out. You can catch Amtrak there.
If you've read any of this blog, you know I landed in Richmond accidentally last August. There's a HUGE mural scene here, they're everywhere. As I was trying to just survive at first, there was no plan. I spent the winter, as a homeless guy, selling one of my Sharpie art drawings for money when I could, and just in survival mode. It was the murals everywhere that made me first think of maybe sticking around for a while. Six months later, I'm still here. Here's one of the many, many murals.
Under freeway, hanging public art piece that somehow reminds me of early airplanes. Across from Main Street Station.
I take the Pulse bus a lot, and this is the view from the Main Street Pulse station. Sitting here several times is kind of what gave me the idea I should walk around this area and take photos someday. Last weekend WAS someday. Make it happen. #RVA #RVAallday
Minimalist street art on the side of a strip club. Stripped down street art? Sorry, couldn't resist.
Here's some art pieces I stumbled across on my little exploratory photo hike in the Shockhoe Bottom area of downtown Richmond, Virginia. These are through the weird little portal doorways a couple of posts back. Really cool looking in the early morning light. #RVAallday
More photos when form last weekend, when I walked around the "urban jungle" part of the Shockhoe Bottom section of downtown Richmond, Virginia. I was walking to a bus stop around dawn, so some cool, backlit flowers, and just started taking pics. I didn't have anywhere to be, so it turned into a fun hour exploring the crazy architecture of this area.
Here's some more photos from my photo taking hike around the Shockhoe Bottom area of downtown Richmond, Virginia, last weekend. I started around dawn, and wandered around for an hour. I started near 14th Street and the James River, along the canal.
Continuing on with my wandering photo hike through the "urban jungle" part of the Shockhoe Bottom area in downtown Richmond, Virginia. It was about dawn when I started snapping pics, and I walked around shooting photos for about an hour. It's a really cool area with all the overhead roads and train tracks. It has a sort of dystopian movie set feel, while having this crazy cool mix of shapes and light and shadow. I started all this near 14th Street by the James River. #RVA all day.
On summer days, these metal bands provide a bit of shade to sit in. Some nights, they form a stage area for bands. In a heavy wind, these super thick steel bands actually sway back and forth. That's really freaky when you're sitting there leaning against one.
The big red square pipes are meant to hark back to the days of the Reynolds Tobacco and furniture factory smokestacks soaring above town. Steam comes out of the top of these pipes at time to complete the factory illusion.
A rat rod in front of the Art Park during the Heavy Rebel Weekender music festival/car show in July 2018.
A different angle, with a rat rod truck in front of the Art Park during Heavy Rebel Weekender 2018.
Looking across the street from the art park at a Cadillac which is the same year as the blue Caddy my Grandpa Mayer in Ohio had when I was a kid. Grandpa's Caddy wasn't lowered and flat black, but this Caddy didn't smell like nasty cigars.
View from the sidewalk inside the park, with Red Dawg Gallery in the background.
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