We Skate Hardcore

We Skate Hardcore is a complex work of visual and narrative power, portraying a contemporary, urban subculture that many of us “know” only in the most superficial sense. Interweaving photographs, film stills, first-person narratives, interviews, and moving images in a collaborative project with his subjects, Cianni created an innovative, unique work that has found its fullest expression in book form. The structure of the book challenges formal preconceptions, just as his rendering of the lives of these young men challenges what we think we know about who they are.

(Iris Tillman Hill, Book Program and Editorial Director, Center for Documentary Studies)

Between 1994 and 2001, I photographed los Sures (the Southside) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I lived. Its landscape evoked the character and life of the community: a well-defined neighborhood of seven square blocks. It had been a predominantly Puerto Rican community since the 1950s. Los Sures was a tough community. Violence, drugs and urban blight existed amidst a strong presence of family, religious, and cultural pride. It was a community where one’s frailties were accepted as much as one’s strengths. I began making portraits of teenagers who were playing handball, basketball and baseball in the parks, schoolyards, streets and sidewalks of the neighborhood.  As the project continued, a larger documentation of a neighborhood began to unfold on the street as well as inside social clubs, places of worship, and at parties and celebrations of culture and religion in homes of people  I had gotten to know.

In 1995, I came across a group of young neighborhood in-line skaters and photographed them in a vacant lot along the East River where they had built an impressive array of ramps, pipes, slides, etc.  After a few weeks of going back to take pictures and getting to know them, I returned one day to find them gone: the ramps, pipes and slides were torn down, and a fence surrounded the lot where they had practiced every day. Some weeks later, as I was photographing around the area of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I discovered them under the elevated highway, having built a new ‘park.’  Soon after, this too was taken away from them, this time by city sanitation trucks after the neighbors on the other side of Williamsburg began complaining to the city about their presence. Their sense of resolve in continuing to skate at whatever cost and in building more parks was their only diversion from “the street.” They went from vacant lot to abandoned building constructing transient skate parks from scrap material.  Their parks existed only until vandals destroyed them or the city sanitation trucks disposed of their ramps and pipes, or when the property owners evicted them from their indoor “parks” in run-down warehouses along the East River.

I documented the skaters’ lives both in the context of their skating as well as their relationships: friends, families, and girlfriends, at house parties, dances, birthdays, weddings, etc.  Some wrote about themselves and their experiences on the photographs I made. They saw their neighborhood and their lives in a realistic way, recognizing their strengths and weaknesses, which sometimes were at odds with the norms by which the larger society measures the success of young people.  They had their dreams and schemes, e.g., being sponsored by an in-line skating company and going pro, having a family, a house, a career, or an office in Manhattan; they were very aware and knowledgeable of popular culture, social issues, future goals and the internal and external obstacles that exist in attaining them. Understanding their commitments, their rites of passage, their mistakes, their success has enlightened me about my own life as I got to know them.