Solid, immovable, beneath the Southbank Centre lies the open space known as the Undercroft — the birthplace of British skateboarding. Gaining access to this cut-off community would be no pushover. To interact with the Undercroft’s skateboarders, my credibility and intent would be rightfully challenged.
Access — granted through time, without gratuity — is key for compelling, authentic photography. Think Arbus, Goldin or Billingham. Without access, we are outsiders pointing our telephotos into the intimate beating heart of a collective we are barred from witnessing. Unable to portray without stealing.
The Undercroft is a community in situ, understandably evolving a territorial attitude. As a means of controlling the skateboarders, barriers were installed by the Southbank Centre, both separating and segregating the skateboarders from the sauntering public of the Queen’s Walk along the Thames River.
There’s a fear factor about this locked off community. Everything is faster. Tricks are landed with force to whoops and cheers, the sounds of grinding wheels and trucks more intense. It's an aggressive sound, it's meant to intimidate. It crackles and scrapes against hard unforgiving concrete.
“There’s a barrier there.”
“I'm a skater too.”
“I don’t care, there’s a barrier over there. Just don’t stand there taking pictures.”
I clocked minutes earlier Twiggy’s agitated expressions. His languid style belies a territorial aggression.
The man unlike them — with neat hair, a utilitarian bag over one shoulder, clothes worn and torn through falls and scrapes noticeably absent — has crouched beside a mushroom column to capture a dope shot. Twiggy accelerates, yet grinds to a halt inches away, demanding fiercely his expulsion.
Startled at the public telling off, the photographer departs. Perhaps embarrassed for his misjudgment at nonchalantly entering the Undercroft.
——————
“A girl just asked me for a photo and I told her straight up ‘no’. It’s hot to be natural, right?” Filipe philosophising the perils of a resting skateboarder along the Undercroft barrier.
“We’re looked at like we’re in a zoo.” Slim explains, Filipe disagrees:
“See, we're all different, but I find it motivating…you’re skating for the crowd. It gets me confident to try to improve.”
After several months of returning to the barrier, the Undercroft regulars are becoming increasingly familiar. I am growing in confidence and on this crisp late afternoon, I engage freely with the Undercroft folk.
“Can I sign into my Facebook?”
Leaning his back to the barrier, Noodle slowly turns to face me. Taken by surprise, his gaze reassures me I have nothing to fear.
Trustingly, I hand over my phone; showing caution would surely risk his distrust. I explain my project of shooting the Undercroft skateboarders, he responds warmly, eyes half-cut, not necessarily from the afternoon sun.
We have only just met but he has a loose ease with which he tells me he is an author:
“I spit and have my own record label.”
I want to believe him, not to dismiss him as a fantasist. Yet his life seems pockmarked with violence and chaos: “I’ve had psychotic episodes...in trouble with the feds, you know, beating the shit out of some of them.”
Later, keen for me to document his latest performance, and wishing to draw a crowd, he beckons me towards a busy spot along the Queen’s Walk. His gliding, hurried pace mirrors his confessional eagerness.
Strapped to my hand, my camera weighs heavily besides me. I’ve asked to shoot him a few times but now my arm is frozen with anxiety, too scared to look into his eyes lest I reflect a coldness, a detached manner I am desperate to not judge him for.
His honest and brutal lyrics detail the newly healed scars along his arms, fingers tapping imagined keys to maintain his verbal rhythm. But there is no gathering crowd. We stand out, a skater and a street photographer. Late autumn is already biting, his homelessness bodes poorly with the oncoming winter. I wish him well and tell him we can shoot some more tomorrow.
Yet I never saw Noodle again. I managed only to capture his legs atop a battered skateboard crossing my path while I stood outside the Undercroft barrier. It did not escape me that, momentarily, I was granted access to this private world.