DUANE PETERS, Going punk. Peters was banished from Newport Beach to Michigan for a year. Going back to the 1970s when the second skate boom was hitting he was a rider for Dogtown Skates and then Santa Cruz. Peters took punk into the pools and bowls and innovated a set list of moves. Peters has played in numerous punk bands, struggled with heroin and lost a child to a car accident. Good times, bad times—Peters has seen more than his share of both. This portrait was taken of him late 2010 at his home in California for The Skateboard Book, The Good, The Rad and the Gnarly. Photo: Lucia Griggi
Half English and half Italian, Cornwall/Venice resident Lucia Griggi’s photography combines the English love of nature and countryside with the Italian love of everything. From shooting portraits in the calm control of a studio to swimming out into the dangerous maelstrom of Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu, Lucia’s photography is a broad palette of still, quiet and beautiful, to violent, loud and beautiful. But beauty is the key ingredient. That’s the Italian side, not that Britons are immune to beauty.
Born in Venice and educated in England, Lucia speaks with an English accent but goes about things with an Italian passion. Over the past three years, her life has been the epitome of adventure; shooting surfing, portraits and commercial work for advertising, editorial and books from South East Asia to the Maldives to South Africa and Hawaii, where she migrates every year to shoot the world’s best surfers in the world’s best waves on the North Shore of Oahu. Female surf photographers are rare, but female surf photographers willing to swim out over the lava reef of the world’s most dangerous wave to capture photographs are even rarer still. Lucia might be unique in that respect, but the results she gets are spectacular: powerful Hawaiian surfing backed by beautiful Hawaiian landscapes.
Accustomed to the passion and action of surfing, it was a natural transition for Lucia to jump aboard The Skateboard project and shoot the sport’s most colorful figures, whose own passion for riding ramps and asphalt matches that of their brethren in the ocean. In an effort to document a complete history of the skateboard, Lucia photographed hundreds of skateboards and dozens of vivid portraits of famous skateboarding figures of past, present and future, including Tony Hawk, Jeff Ho, Tom Sims and Dogtown Boy Skip Engblom.
Lucia’s energetic and unique style of work appears internationally for her Advertising and Editorial clients.
Lucia has also contributed to various surf-related book publications, including Extreme Surf, The Surfing Handbook, and The Surfing Yearbook. Her most significant book contribution before The Skateboard came in the vivid and beautiful 2010 look-book, Shooting the Curl, which showcases the work of 15 top international photographers and tells the inside story on the surfers and the waves that inspire them.