Ed Templeton

Eleven years in the making, and compiling more than 30 years of material, Ed Templeton's scrapbook of his upbringing in suburban Orange County California is a much-anticipated book. Its photographs give a sun-drenched glimpse of what it might be like to be young and alive in the "suburban domestic incubator" of Orange County, conveyed in the idiom of Nan Goldin or Larry Clark (and with a sharp eye for the streets that recalls Garry Winogrand or Eugene Richards). For like his groundbreaking show more predecessors, Templeton is always a participant in the scenes he shoots. Deformer interweaves disciplinary letters from Templeton's grandfather and religious notes from his mother with sketches, snapshots, telling images and the occasional brutal tale, laying out an unresolved narrative that plunges readers headlong into Templeton's chaotic upbringing and his reliance on art and skateboarding to accommodate its stresses and joys. "Skateboarding allowed me to travel the world, and that showed me that where I live is totally messed up," he observes. "That perspective has fueled me and been a source for my art." Through photographs, stories and ephemera of all sorts from his youth and teenage years, Templeton offers readers an intensely close and personal look at an artist's coming of age. This boxed limited edition comes with a signed and numbered photograph by Ed Templeton. show less

The Swimming Pool is a new photographic essay from California-based street photographer Deanna Templeton (born 1969) that departs from her usual style to offer an expressive, intimate view of the human form underwater. The series was born after an impromptu nude swimming-pool shoot of husband and artist Ed Templeton, which spurred an eight-year journey in the study of light, expression and the enigma of water. Shooting entirely on color and black-and-white film and Polaroid, Templeton sent show more friends into the pool to be photographed in their truest form. Unlike her street photography, in which subjects were often strangers, Templeton found that creating these portraits required more intimacy and connection―a feeling that is apparent throughout every image in the series, which show strong, liberated individuals, confident and at ease in their most beautiful and vulnerable moments. As Ed Templeton writes in his afterword to this volume, "the nude swimmer is floating in a void of quiet solitude, the gentle pressure of being underwater enclosing her form like a baby in a womb and nothing exists outside of this world. A lone figure amidst a sea of blues and greys and frenetic sunlight performing a solitary dance for the photographer above, choosing movements and directions, twisting and swooping, contorting and expelling breaths painting a picture of form and light together." The Swimming Pool offers a deep and inspiring view of the human form. show less

There are teenage smokers and drinkers. There are those whose despondence is clearly evident as they confront the camera with vacant eyes. This, quite simply put, is The Golden Age of Neglect - a classic example of Ed Templeton's work which is deeply anchored in street life and street style, music (rock, punk, and rap), and graphic culture (wall paintings, murals, tags, and graffiti). This is the vision of an artist who crosses the realms of art, sports, sex, drugs, violence, fashion, and show more youth. A fixture of the Los Angeles skateboarding scene, Ed Templeton has been producing photographs, documenting a real story of his life, international tours, and encounters in the skateboarding world for over 10 years. Fuelled by incredible raw energy, irreverence, and spontaneity, his work is comprised of an extraordinary number of photographs and canvases, as well as a body of graphic work from drawings, sketch books and collages to montages and correspondence. This book quickly rose to cult status shortly after its first printing in 2002. show less

In Adventures in the Nearby Away, Templeton takes us 26 miles across the Pacific Ocean into a beautiful island called Santa Catalina. This place is a paradise-like little island that seems to have become a time capsule. It's almost like time never moved forward. Templeton has been visiting this island since he was a boy and in this book, he documents its beauty as well as the people who go explore it. The photographs have been shot in film and they span all the way back to the late 1990's.