I think this confirms how powerful still photography can be - even today. “Hugh’s story and his three years of photographing this work will forever be an important record of California history.

“I find Hugh’s work to be as important as any photography I have ever published,” Crist says. Hugh has always considered himself a street photographer - not a sports photographer or a ‘skateboard photographer.’ His photographs of that era are now celebrated, vintage time capsules of the 1970s aesthetic.” “Hugh came to California from Oklahoma, and I know the sunlight and the scene here were really inspiring to him. “Hugh’s work has such a beautiful and artful style, and his earliest street photographs captured a special time in California history,” says Steve Crist, who has served as the publisher and editor of several books of Holland’s photography. One such photographer was Hugh Holland, a now-legendary figure in the visual arts community who captured not just the skaters themselves, but the landscape they lived, worked and played in, and the spirit of the era. Few had the foresight to see a historic moment for what it was - but a handful of local photographers began to capture it on film, mesmerized by the style that “sidewalk surfers” brought to their communities. That wasn’t true back in the 1970s, at the inception of what was then a truly countercultural movement. These days, locals take it for granted that skaters rule the streets of Los Angeles.

Retrospect skateboards