Wynn Miller

Snaps a Skate God

By Kyle Lemmon

10.20.08

Wynn Miller’s 25-year home in Mara Vista, CA attests to his love of surfing, but nestled in his tranquil grotto home lined with surfboards and paintings lies his true passion – a cooled photography studio protecting him from the SoCal heat. Throughout his photographic career, Miller’s carved out a body of photographic work that runs the gamut from commercial ads, skateboarding, features, and photojournalism.

After his bout with chasing surf dreams, Miller dove into photography and eventually grew a relationship with the infamous Dogtown clandestine skater, Tony Alva. Miller recalls their preliminary meeting. “Ray Flores said, Tony, this is Wynn and he’s a really good photographer, and Tony was like ‘yeah, we’ll see about that.’” The cocksure Alva and his crew were known to attack the drought-ridden pools of mid-‘70s Southern California. “The Z Boys” spent innumerable hours in those empty pools carving up their low-slung histories, and Miller was there to capture it. Antics asked Miller to take some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his past, present, and what’s developing in the darkroom in the future.

How did you get involved with photography from the outset?

I was living in Hawaii in the early ’70s trying to be a professional surfer but it took me a year or two to realize that I was only mediocre. That was about as good as I was going to get. I surf all the time. I just got back from Cabo San Lucas a couple days ago. My dad gave me my first camera in the ’50s and I started fooling around. I met a guy over there that taught me how to use the darkroom. I decided to come back and study photography. So, I moved back to LA and attended Santa Monica College in their photography department. That’s the beginning.

As far as the skateboarding part of your portfolio, how did that come about?

That was around 1976 or ’77. I had a friend named Ray Flores who’s a big name in the skateboarding industry in Venice Beach. He’s been around forever. He and a friend of his named Rudy Manheim [photographer] asked me if I wanted to take pictures of this guy Tony Alva, who was a skateboarder. I knew nothing about taking skate pictures. I had no idea what was going on. Even though I’d been in Venice for surfing I just wasn’t tuned into that scene. I went and watched him skateboard one day and it was kind of neat. I brought my camera the next day and coincidentally I had some published pictures of an East LA gang that I shot and Tony saw those. He kind of thought I was a cool guy.
I just started to come and shoot Tony skating. I pretty quickly realized that Tony was the most interesting guy in and out of the pool. We just kind of became friends and whenever he had something going on we would work together to come up with ideas for photos. Within in a couple years I had enough of skateboarding and skateboarders and I moved on from there. I tucked the pictures away and they just sat dormant for a really long time and then the guy that owns FRESHJIVE, Rick Klotz, kind of discovered my work and said he wanted to put on a show.
We mounted these shows called the FRESHJIVE Mad Dog Chronicles and had exhibits in Japan, Paris, London, New York, and LA. It was the second coming of the work. That was within these last two years.

You said you were tired of skateboarding and skateboarders. I know you have a long history of commercial photography. Did you just want to pursue other things?

Well, part of it was that skateboarding kind of took a turn into punk in the early ’80s and I really wasn’t interested in punk. I was 30 years old by then [laughs]. I tried but it just wasn’t moving me. It got ugly. There was all this violence and I just wasn’t interested in that. Like I said, I needed to make money and there was no money in skateboarding photography then. I was happy to move on from there. I opened up my own studio in Marina Del Ray and I was there for 20 years.

As far as coming from these disparate worlds of advertising and skateboarding photography, going from one to the other, how did you make that transition aesthetically?

I tended to bring my ideas and theories into the skateboarding world rather than the other direction. I’m sure I was the first guy to bring my strobes and set up all these different types of lighting. My goal, since I saw Tony as this heroic figure, I always wanted to shoot him that way. I always shot him in a way that made him larger than life. The pictures weren’t just an action shot; either they had really neat lightning or his expression was unusual. I think my advertising experience was way more of an influence on me than vice versa. Basically, in those days it was just really young kids with a fish eye lens doing skateboarding pictures. It wasn’t hard to move it up and out from there.

What projects are you working on right now that you’re really excited about?

I’ve just started this project that’s going to be called Malibu Summer. Obviously it won’t be this summer. I’ve spent most of my life surfing at Malibu Beach and spending my time there. There’s so many interesting characters, little subcultures there. It’s like its own little tribal world. I want to spend a summer shooting the people and the things on the beach. Not so much the surfing – there will be some of that – but it’s mostly about what happens offshore than onshore. There’s these old characters, old stuntmen that go there everyday and put their chair in the exact same spot. You know, those guys they sit by the wall. The kids have their little section and the girls come and hang out. Of course, there are thousands of surfers who surf there everyday. There’s a lot of drama. People just drive by Malibu Beach and see the guys surfing but they don’t get that there’s all these different levels of excitement and interest going on there.

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