Colin Read

In 1998, Nike launched an ad series, “What If We Treated All Athletes the Way We Treat Skateboarders?”, featuring parodies that portrayed runners, golfers, and tennis players being regulated and harassed for simply playing their sports. The quirky subversion of the public scrutiny skaters face reveals the brand’s ambition to enter the lucrative market of underground youth by showing it gets the community. Now considered iconic for its creativity, the campaign was received poorly by the skaters themselves at the time. Their skepticism toward outsiders’ image-making attests to the subculture’s anti-establishment values, which have long found expression in DIY practices of self-documentation.

In his films, NYC-based filmmaker Colin Read uses skateboarding to playfully reflect on themes such as life, death, and nature. His 90s-style fisheye Sony VX1000 evokes nostalgia for the heyday of skateboarding, but his visual language expands and challenges the format, both in its content and form. The success of Read’s skate films gave him the opportunity to create music videos for Radiohead, Glass Animals and Weezer, as well as commercials for Converse, Lexus and Burberry. While skateboarding features in some of his commercials, the visual language and technical skill he built through skate videography creep into all of his work.