Hardback.
160 pages.
Chronicle Books 2019. ISBN978-1-4521-8205-6
In the 1970s Hugh Holland epitomised being in the "right place, right time" when as an enthusiastic amateur photographer he first saw kids skating the long winding roads of Laurel Canyon. Over the course of 3 years he amassed a huge body of photographs. Thirty something years later these emerged as the now classic Locals Only Book.
Holland's new book Silver.Skate.Seventies. features a never before published collection of black and white photographs he shot in the late 1970s. Printed in this large format book, the photographs offer a rare and beautiful snapshot of Southern Californian kids kick starting a cultural phenomena that would go on to permeate every aspect of youth culture.
Whilst Holland's contemporaries like Glen E. Friedman and Craig Fineman have put out some great books on the era, this is the first to focus strictly on photography and present the images in a large extended edition.
ABOUT HUGH HOLLAND
Neither a professional photographer nor a skateboarder, Hugh Holland captured some of the most enduring and beautiful photographs of the birth of modern skateboarding. Only active between 1975 and 1978, he documented the exact moment bored surfers took a children's toy and used the banks of closed high schools, empty swimming pools and the canyon roads of LA County to emulate surfing waves. Whilst Glen E. Friedman and Craig Stecyk pioneered the aggressive punk attitude of Dogtown, Holland's photos offer a very different aesthetic, cinematic and graceful but also capturing the youthful innocence of the very first skate rats.
Read "Hugh Holland and the Unsung Heroes of the Hollywood Hills" on The Golden Rays Blog
