151. Ed Templeton

About Art

California-based artist Ed Templeton is known for his interdisciplinary practice, most notably of photographs documenting people and street life of Huntington Beach, California, intimate portraits of his wife, and paintings depicting the psychological complexity of American suburbia. He first gained recognition as a teenage skateboard prodigy in the late 1980s and taught himself to photograph on the fly while actively touring for competitions. All of Templeton’s subjects come from his own life: “Everything I’ve ever shot has just been on the path that I’ve been on, be it skating or travel or street photography.” Blurring portraiture and landscape, Templeton works across photography, painting, and drawing to explore the ugliness, banality, and beauty of the familiar everyday world.

He and Zuckerman discuss permission, looking at ourselves, what’s weird about Orange County, finding skateboarding, the absence of free will, seeing things before they happen, managing fear, the flow state, mining his own archives, hyper reality, and collaborating with his wife!