In
1975, when Hugh Holland first began photographing the
skateboarders in southern California, he had already been living in
Los Angeles for nine years. His interest in photography had
developed in the mid-sixties as a 20-year-old living in his native
state of Oklahoma. Except for a college job working in a photo lab,
Holland had no formal art education. Howeve, he spent years
training his eye by shooting photographs and working with the
images.
It
wasn't until after returning from a trip to Spain in 1968 and
settling into what would become a career in West Hollywood as an
antique finisher, that he began to seriously pursue the hobby. He
made a dark room and began photographing everything that came into
sight. A favorite subject—from the beginning—was the
figure.
Then
one afternoon in 1975, while driving up Laurel Canyon Boulevard,
Holland encountered his first skateboarders carving up the drainage
ditches along the side of the canyon, and Holland knew he had found
his subject. Although not a skateboarder himself, Holland never
tired of capturing on film the beauty and grace of the burgeoning
craze for the next three years. By 1978, the scene had become
more commercial, and Holland’s documentation of the skateboarders
came to its natural end.
Hugh
Holland’s Angels series was first shown at M+B in early
2006. Following the success of the show, the work was shown
internationally in London, Paris and New York, with upcoming
exhibitions in Sydney and the Pera Museum is Istanbul. His work has
been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker,
npr, and the Los Angeles Times. In 2010, the
artist’s monograph Locals Only
by AMMO Books was published in conjunction with his second
exhibition at M+B, and in 2011, the Museum of Contemporary
Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles included his work in the first major U.S.
museum survey of graffiti and street art in a group exhibition
entitled “Art in the Streets.” Hugh Holland currently resides in
Los Angeles.
