All In: David Swift, Skateboard Photography from 1989–2025 by Dave Swift

I got to know Dave through skateboard friends, and soon after, we collaborated on issue #5 of Tails Of… the photographers. His professionalism, his knowledge of our subculture, and the fact that he’s worked with and taken photos of everyone that matters in the last 25 years are impressive. When he told me about this project in progress, the anticipation was high. Dave was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book.

Skate Book Club (SBC): A lot of skate photographers are making books now. Why is this happening now?

Swift: In my opinion, people who grew up with 1990s skateboarding are feeling nostalgic to see all the great images they remember from their childhood. That decade was all about magazines and skate videos. When it came to showcasing the progression of skateboarding, you had so many great visual artists documenting what was happening. I mean, the 1980s were cool, but there were only a couple of photographers doing all the work, whereas in the 90s they were everywhere.

Not sure who besides myself has a book coming out, but I can name a dozen or more that should from that era—Lance Dawes, Geoff Graham, Skin Phillips, Ryan Gee, Mark Waters, Luke Ogden, Daniel Harold Sturt, Wig Worland, Chris Ortiz, Rick Kosick, Spike Jonze, Mike Ballard, Mike O’Meally, Atiba Jefferson, and more. All of them have file cabinets of gems and plenty of stories to go with the images. I look forward to seeing them all in print once again. Books are the shit!

SBC: What is your favorite photography style?

Kind of hard to answer that because there are so many ways to describe skate photography style. I like to see sharp focus images that are well composed and lit because working at TWS all those years, that’s what we were known for. But the most important thing is to make sure the skating is portrayed in a way that makes it look its most awesome. The trick, the spot, and the skater all come together to make the photo stand out; and oh yeah, the photographer should get a tiny bit of credit.

SBC: What is your favorite kind of skate photo? What’s the composition like? Lens?

Swift: I dig them all. Street, pools, vert, ditches, vintage (old school), modern (new school), film, digital, 35mm, medium format, portrait, landscape, sunsets, blue sky, B&W, color, but most of all, my favorite type of photography is the kind printed in a magazine or book. If there was a thing I was known for in skate photography, it would most likely be the horizontal (landscape) style of skate photography. Way back, I realized that shooting vertical, it limited how I composed, especially when it came to transition skating. It makes the most sense when shooting backyard pools because. I think the terrain as a whole enhances the skating, and every pool is different. I find it really hard to make a vertically composed backyard pool shot look great. Just my opinion. As for lenses, I don’t tend to use many. In my bag, I have a 15mm fisheye, 80-200mm, and 85mm for portraits and stuff, but I don’t use it all too often.

SBC: Do you have a favorite skate photo of all time?

Swift: It’s funny how easy this one is to answer. I mean, I’ve been looking at skateboard photos since 1977, and I can clearly say that my favorite was a shot that I saw in Skateboarder Magazine in 1980. Every time I see it, I get so psyched. It’s a color photo of original Powell-Peralta skater Jay Smith, who was widely recognized as the layback slide master at the time. The photo of Jay I’m talking about was a shot by William Sharp that was taken at a backyard pool somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. The image is composed using a normal lens, and it has Jay doing a lapover grind from the deep to the shallow. His rear truck is in full view on the coping, and the colors are amazing. I’ve tried to copy this image while shooting pools for many years.

SBC: What about your favorite photo that you’ve taken?

Swift: Not a fair question. Asking that of a photographer who’s shot skateboarding for more than 30 years is silly. I can pick out a handful if you like from the different eras I’ve shot. Steve Claar ollie over the channel in Münster, Germany 1990, Frank Hirata, ollie at El Cortez pool 1992, Steve Berra roof gap crooked grind 1996, Eric Koston backside noseblunt at night 1995, Chad Muska tailslide in San Diego 1995, Peter Hewitt frontside invert on that crazy Neil Blender set up 2005, Heath Kirchart 50-50 in Santa Barbara, Danny Way bomb drop from helicopter, John Worthington rock and roll in El Paso, Jesse Lindloff tuck knee invert in San Clemente and many more. I guess that’s why I made a book!

SBC: Who are your favorite photographers?

Swift: Another tough one. When I really got into skating around 1979, I was really digging the Independent truck ads that were coming out in Skateboarder. Later on, I realized the photographer was Ted Terrebone, and he shot with some of my favorite skaters. In the 1980s, there was no one better than Grant Brittain, not even close. 1990s had to be… Not even going to mention a name. No favorites after the 1990s, but most everyone is good.

SBC: What took you so long? This book should have happened years ago.

Swift: At the end of a long photo career, I believe every one of us wants to get a book of their work published. After the Skateboard Mag ceased publishing, I had to look for other photo jobs to pay the bills, but as they got further and further apart, I began searching for a publisher that was willing to produce a book for me. I think Grant’s book ‘Push’ came out in 2020, and Pete Thompson had ’93 Til’ come out a few years later. I had worked with both of them for many years while doing magazine stuff, so I just talked to them about how they made it happen, and Pete’s publisher seemed like the best option. I ended up getting the contact info for Goff/Oro (my publisher) and sent them an email in hopes they’d be down to work with me. They were into it, and we went through all the initial contract stuff, created a publishing timeline, they assigned an editor and designer to work with me, and I did the rest. I pretty much worked on it all the way through 2025. Editing the photos, writing copy, and getting quotes from skaters I’ve shot over my career, which took some doing. I think the resulting 260-page book is looking pretty nice.

SBC: What were the best and worst parts of the book-making process?

Swift: The best part was figuring out just how I wanted the book to flow. At first, I just thought photos chronologically would work best, but I had a story to tell, and there were some key figures in my career that helped make me successful. Making chapters with Steve Caballero, Jeremy Klein/Ron Chatman, Rob Dyrdek/Eric Koston, Frank Hirata, Geoff Rowley/Tom Penny, Danny Way, Tony Hawk/Christian Hosoi. Sandwiching chronological photo sections in between was the way to go. And yeah, the last chapter is Heath Kirchart, that’s my real favorite part. 

I don’t really think there was a “worst” part, but the hardest part was coming up with a book title. I made a list on my phone and added to it all the time. I think in the end I had about 100 possible titles to choose from, but the one that best described my journey in skate photography was ‘All In’ because that’s what I was from the minute I picked up a camera and shot that first skate image.

SBC: How does this photography book stand out from other books? Is there something you are especially proud of or something unexpected that will surprise us?

Swift: Good question and not easy to answer. From the beginning, I wanted to put together something that told the story of my skate magazine career. Here’s something you might not know: I was originally hired at Transworld Skateboarding as a writer, and on my first day working there, my title was Editorial Assistant. I sat in an office and transcribed interviews, wrote captions, edited articles, and attended editorial meetings. It was a job in the skate industry, but I really wanted to be out there where skating was happening, and to do that in those days, you needed to be a photographer. At the same time, I knew skate photographers, and they only got paid when photos were published, and that wasn’t guaranteed. For me, I had an office job that paid a salary and also the freedom to go out and shoot photographs. I figured out early that doing both was the way to go, and I’d say it worked out. That being said, my book might stand out because I have the photos and the stories to back them up. I’m pretty sure most skateboarding books don’t have the photographer writing all the copy.

You can pre-order All In on Amazon, from the publisher Goff, or if you’d like a signed copy, that comes with a print, DM Dave Swift on Instagram.

Unbalanced: A Life of Schizophrenia and Skateboarding by Jason Waters & Adam Sutton

There’s a common refrain in skateboarding about how, for many, it quiets the outside noise and is a release from the daily churn of a mind in modern times. In an interview with–ahem, me–on Quartersnacks, professional skater Tyler Surrey confided he “needs it to stay mentally calm and healthy.” As a skater participating in modern life, I could relate, but I never had any personal experience with this idea beyond distracting myself from responsibilities and stress. When I read the Jason Waters interview by Josh Hill of his book Unbalanced: A Life of Schizophrenia & Skateboarding in Skate Jawin Issue 90, I knew I had to read his first-hand account for myself. The organization of independent publishing in skateboarding hooked me up again.

Unbalanced is co-written with Adam Sutton, who Jason says helped him organize his thoughts and stories about his life into a cohesive structure. The book’s construction is simple and reads as a memoiristic first-person story focusing on two major aspects of Jason’s life: skateboarding and schizophrenia. We are brought in on a nebulous note, one I read as an early experience of Jason’s condition, and then the story unfolds gently with the setup of Jason’s world and his discovery of skateboarding. I have never met Jason, but quickly the easy tone felt like I heard his voice telling me his story in my head – ironic for a book about schizophrenia, but also soothing, as if I was being gently led through one of Jason’s soft summer nights on rural roads in his father’s town in Kentucky or ledges and loading docks of his mother’s more urban home, Charlotte, North Carolina, where he split his formative years learning how to live with his condition.

Jason writes with a palpable tenderness towards himself that is admirable and honest, imbuing his story with genuine reverence towards life and its access to beauty. This compassionate expression gets extended to the reader far more naturally than much best-selling prose I’ve read. It’s not just for style, as it transmits the experience of living with schizophrenia directly and conversationally. As someone with no first-hand and little second-hand knowledge of schizophrenia, he offered a very expansive and thoughtful opening. 

For skateboarders, that experience is set against the story arcs of discovering skateboarding, learning about the industry, wanting to make it in that industry, and then establishing yourself as an individual in the culture. Unbalanced is not about how skateboarding saved Jason, or even really about how skateboarding distracted him from his problems. Skateboarding itself could not keep Jason “mentally calm and healthy,” as it does for Tyler Surrey. Instead, Jason shows how both schizophrenia and skateboarding, big aspects of his life, affect each other and him as a multifaceted person. With help from Adam Sutton, we are treated to a hero’s journey, but with the trials and tribulations coming from the hero himself. In the end, Jason is not only the master of two worlds, he is also an interpreter of potential possibilities for others.

-Abada