Death Metal Summer: Deanna Templeton and Ed Templeton

With works from 1995-2022 selected and laid out in three large wall installations, it is a highly energetic overview of their overlapping visions. The show features many of the married couple’s most famous images – from Deanna’s exquisite swimming pool photos to Ed’s iconic pipe skating work – as well as those shot on their local turf Huntington Beach, California, where late capitalist life and the suburban dream are collapsing in on themselves.

 

Shooting with film and employing an off-the-cuff street-style manner, the artists respond to the chaotic intensity and impossible beauty and sadness of life in a manner that seems that there is always something at stake.

 

And for both of them there always has been.

 

Ed became a professional skateboarder a month before graduating from high school in 1990. He credits skateboarding and art as sustaining him through challenging teenage years. Instead of falling apart, instead of getting caught up in drugs and alcohol, it was these creative mediums that, in his own words, ‘deformed’ him in a more productive way. He started taking photos of life around him on the professional skateboarding tour in the year he began his own skateboard brand, Toy Machine. This included antics at parties, in vans, other skaters, and all the layers of people who lived in and around the streets he skated. His subjects included those who, like him and Deanna, did not fit into the world of regular jobs, suburban dreams, and financial aspiration.

 

There’s a great line from Ed about his childhood in this respect in Mike Mills’ mini film Deformer, 2000, about the pair: My dad ran off when I was 8 years old with an 18-year-old babysitter. For a while I was a ninja, then I quickly found skateboarders and punkers. They were the only people who accepted just about anyone… A lot of people have a fucked up family and it deforms you, but I got deformed in a better way.

 

It was a little different for Deanna. She started taking photos at the age of fifteen, shooting the LA punk scene she was engaging with literally every single night, with a camera her parents had bought her to hopefully save her from falling out of their orbit. Yet she was full of doubts and insecurities about every level of herself and her life, self-harming, dealing with an eating disorder, filling her self-made diaries with her reflections. And moving place to place, losing all the photos of her bar one. And so her shots of young women became stand-in self-portraits, as she says: ’I see my own struggles, disappointment and bravery in these girls’. She would later often pair these with her portraits of other young women as she found a legion of troubled kindred spirits around her as seen in her recent major work (book and exhibition) What She Said. Importantly, her perspective also extended to how she documented her life with Ed on the skateboard tour, revealing the flip-side of the male dominated scene they were a part of.

 

Their single images succeed in grasping our attention and can be located in a lineage of photographers that includes those like Bresson, Frank, Arbus, Lange and Goldberg. Yet, as their images accumulate, and as presented in exhibitions such as this, as well as in their zines and books, their practices form a complex matrix documenting the breakdown of an entire social fabric based on a set of unsustainably hypocritical moral codes and their spatial formations. In the process, therefore, their works draw almost constant attention to the flicker between giddy moments of release and the most intensely problematic aspects of human life - like poverty and racism, unrestrained power, sexism – that are intimately connected to the collapse of Imperial and nationalist ideals that excluded and damaged so many.