CONCRETE TO SALTWATER

Skateboarders and surfers defy gravity on a California beach in this vibrant photography book.

Averill, a photographer, surfer, and skateboarder, collects 10 years of his photos from the Venice, California, beach, which hosts an iconic surf culture as well as a thriving beachside skateboarding park (which, alas, is currently buried in sand because of COVID-19 restrictions). The setting offers a wealth of resonant visual juxtapositions. The ocean pictures feature surfers riding roughly 4-to-12-foot waves that curl into translucent green-blue pipes amid gorgeous beachscapes, where sea and sun mesh to drape the hills in a golden mist. The skateboard park is a riotous sea, frozen in stone, shaped in curves and undulations, and surfaced in perfectly smooth, gray concrete; it’s a terrain that looks simultaneously austere and sensuous through Averill’s lens. (A few photos cover excursions to grungier Los Angeles skateboarding sites, including a giant drainpipe and an abandoned swimming pool.) In part, the photos are an engaging fashion catalog; the surfers seem somewhat buttoned-down in their neoprene wetsuit uniforms, but the skateboarders feature a profusion of long hair and dreadlocks inside no-nonsense helmets and bulky padding on top of floridly tattooed skin, open to the sky. (Bridging the divide is a classic California tableau of a blond-haired woman in a bikini gliding along on a skateboard—while carrying a surfboard.) Still, there’s much commonality in the athleticism of surfers and skateboarders as they thread their ways along vertical surfaces and rocket off of them. Averill’s skateboard photos are particularly vivid in their portraits of elegant aerobatics; he captures the skaters high in midair, sometimes sideways or upside down, clinging nonchalantly—or not at all—to their flimsy boards. Their postures are crouched and twisted with spindly arms flung out for balance, yet poised and perfectly at ease. The result is a captivating vision of grace.

A striking collection of images that ably spotlight the balletic artistry of board sports.