Rare Photos of Southern California Skateboarders Tearing Up Empty Pools in the 70s

Redis­cov­ered pho­tos of the rene­gade pool skat­ing phe­nom­e­non of 70s South­ern Cal­i­for­nia cap­tured by Craig Fine­man.

If you were liv­ing in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia in ’77, you were faced with a bru­tal drought. As a result, the State of Cal­i­for­nia decid­ed that your back­yard swim­ming pool was no longer a splash zone but a dust bowl and fill­ing it with water was now ille­gal. Sud­den­ly, you’ve got hun­dreds of emp­ty pools bak­ing under the sun with no pur­pose in sight.

Game over, right? Well where your aver­age Joe home­own­er saw defeat, a bunch of Cal­i­for­nia skate­board­ers saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty to hone their tech­niques. Hence the art of pool skat­ing. Born from a drought, this grace­ful art took skate­board­ing in a new, rene­gade direc­tion.

Per­son­al­ly, my first expo­sure to this pool­side phe­nom­e­non hap­pened in my child­hood, there was an episode of Rock­et Pow­er where they drained some poor kid’s pool to shred it up while his par­ents were away, leav­ing him behind to face the con­se­quences of an emp­ty pool cov­ered in a cat­a­stroph­ic mess of wheel marks. Before then, sev­en-year-old me did­n’t know you could just skate in a pool, and I con­tin­ue to mar­vel at the inge­nu­ity of the con­cept to this day.

At some point in the ear­ly days of skate­board­ing, before the mod­ern lux­u­ries of skate parks built by the city and paid by your tax dol­lars, some guys decid­ed you could have more fun skat­ing on con­crete than just asphalt alone. All of the fresh­ly-drained pools were prime can­di­dates for skat­ing, but it was going to take a bit of effort to get to them.

Some broke into drought-strick­en back­yards and oth­ers took a more diplo­mat­ic approach, sweet-talk­ing strangers into let­ting them use their pools, some­times pos­ing as rogue pool clean­ers with fake com­pa­ny logos attached to their cars, or some­times even being pool clean­ers and doing the job in exchange for a bit of skat­ing on a new­ly-cleaned and ren­o­vat­ed pool. Now that’s com­mit­ment.

One of the first peo­ple to doc­u­ment this phe­nom­e­non was the man behind this set of shots I found, Craig Fine­man, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er who cap­tured the likes of Jay Adams and Tony Alva (along with the rest of the Z‑Boys) in their prime, immor­tal­iz­ing their grav­i­ty-defy­ing stunts in Skate­board­er mag­a­zine and beyond.

The sto­ry behind these pho­tos is evi­dent­ly very sim­ple — Fine­man met some local skaters, fol­lowed them to a pool they may or may not have had per­mis­sion to be at, and spent the day shoot­ing them in action.

Nobody seems to know exact­ly what years this skate ses­sion was shot, but it was def­i­nite­ly some­time between 1977–79 if the rest of the inter­net is to be believed. The shots them­selves are per­fect, look at that form, look at those pio­neer­ing skate tech­niques. Sure, there were prob­a­bly a few wipe­outs along the way, but you would­n’t guess it from the angles Fine­man deft­ly cap­tured. Grav­i­ty? Psh, over­rat­ed. Part of me won­ders if any of these guys being shot ever thought they were defin­ing an era in that moment.

The crazy part is that these pho­tos seem­ing­ly nev­er even saw the light of day until around a decade ago when Fine­man’s long­time friend Dun­can Camp­bell and a small under­ground brand called Stussy (you’ve prob­a­bly nev­er heard of them) unearthed these pho­tos to put out a col­lec­tion of them in the form of a book, exact­ly a decade post-Fine­man’s pass­ing. Talk about a delayed rev­e­la­tion. We’re glad they did though, and drought or not, the noble tra­di­tion of pool skat­ing still con­tin­ues to this day, and now I’m think­ing maybe it’s time to find a few pools of my own.

Pools by Craig Fine­man is pub­lished by Dash­wood Books togeth­er with Stussy and can be pur­chased through Dash­wood’s online store.