Through Jason Dill’s Eyes

Jason Dill, a skateboarder, began taking pictures in the late 1990s. Numerous of them. He traveled almost everywhere with disposable cameras and the occasional point-and-shoot, filming his life as many people do today with cell phones. He remembered recently, “It’s just what you did.” He warned that if you didn’t, those moments before social media would be irretrievably lost. 

Even by the standards of a careless and prolific pro skateboarder, Dill’s life offered an extraordinarily colorful palette of opportunities to photograph. Dill, a fiery prodigy from Huntington Beach, arrived in New York in 1998 and made a name for himself as one of the city’s most exciting and fashionable young skaters. (His final line on the “Photosynthesis” video by the 2000 Alien Workshop is a timeless classic.)

At the time, skateboarding was transitioning from a local sport mostly focused on competitions to a global symbol of cool that permeated the evolving world of fashion. Dill was at the center of it all, wearing Helmut Lang and A.P.C. when other skaters still preferred huge shorts and monster truck-sized sneakers. He spent months at a period traveling skating to far-off places like Paris, Tokyo, and Johannesburg.

Back in New York City, he became a member of the Supreme skate squad as well as the famed graffiti crew IRAK, which included artists like Dash Snow who helped define an era. He rapidly assimilated himself into the vibrant party culture in downtown New York. “That’s what I really liked—becoming close with and becoming friends with people who didn’t skateboard at all,” he said. “We were all very alive at the time.”

When Dill reemerged in Los Angeles in 2011, he was skating again and expanding his fledgling apparel line, Fucking Awesome, into a full-fledged skate brand. The decade of post-9/11 hedonism nearly brought Dill to ruin. Dill is now considered to be a titan in his field. He has ruined some of the coolest and most promising young skaters in the last ten years, including Sean Pablo, Na-Kel Smith, and Tyshawn Jones, and transformed Fucking Awesome clothing into the line of streetwear that every kid wants to get sent to detention for wearing to school.

He never stopped recording his life. Dill remembered, “Someone told me it was an excellent idea to snap images of these encounters.” I’m glad they did.”

Currently, Prince Street, a new monograph of Dill’s photography, is being released through Fucking Awesome (Photos from Africa, People Remembered, Places Forgotten). Despite Dill’s propensity for mischief, the 250-page book is primarily made up of peaceful moments that were taken while traveling or in hotel rooms. Since he can’t drive, Dill frequently captured pictures from the backseat of vehicles.

Some compositions are stunningly gorgeous and unexpected: In one, a man riding a wheelchair and wearing a bathrobe watches a cricket match being played in the distance. Some photographs show more private moments, such as a naked woman looking through luggage on a bedroom floor. As Dill describes in the book’s brief introduction, many of his photographs imply that there is a strange tale lurking just beneath the surface, “to remember what I might forget.” One such image is of a note affixed to a wall that reads: “I MOVED OUT, RAN OUT OF MONEY… SORRY AND THANK YOU.” The note is signed “JASON DILL #19.”

Nearly as startling as what is included is what is not. One example is that there isn’t a single photograph of a skateboard. The novel, according to Dill, “Has nothing to do with skateboarding at all.” Plenty of people took photos of him skating—Tobin Yelland and Ari Marcopoulos among them—but Dill had a more expansive taste. “I just took photos of whatever situations and whatever I was doing and whatever I saw that I thought was beautiful and strange or funny or weird,” he said. He had great timing: a taken in Greece captures the exact moment a woman in a passing cab picks her nose. “It’s very human,” Dill said of the image. “I’m not making fun of her, it’s just funny.”

The fact that Dill put a lot of effort into these pictures can be lost in the nonchalance of his demeanor. He described acting quickly when he observed a couple fighting on the streets of Miami while speaking on the phone from his current home in Pasadena. The end result is a menacing image of a man crouching on the pavement in front of a lady who appears to be approaching him while clenching her fists.

I watched her kick him. And I ran up and shot the photo,” Dill recalled. He used to follow people on the street, too, until the right moment to take their photo (usually unseen) presented itself. In hindsight, perhaps because we now live in a social media panopticon, Dill seems conflicted about whether he should have taken those photos at all. “Am I lame for that?” he says. “I don’t know. I’m glad I have the image. I just know that I wouldn’t shoot photos like that again. It’s just too intrusive, and strange.”

Dill informed me he still feels uneasy about his photography, even though the majority of it has never been displayed before. He has included some of his images in the graphic collages he created for Fucking Awesome skate decks and merchandise. “There were a few times where I was on the fence about making the book, ’cause I just wasn’t sure if it was good enough. But I’m like that with everything. I’m always worried that something’s not good enough, in everything I do,” he said, before reminding himself that he is, by one metric, a professional photographer: he was hired by Thebe Kgositsile (AKA Earl Sweatshirt) to shoot the cover of his 2013 album Doris. The moody portrait of Thebe in front of a crucifix is the most famous one in the book. “I’m proud of that work. I shot it a certain way for it to come out a certain way, and it worked,” Dill says. “I guess to my credit, I do have a little bit of experience… though I’ve never been asked to shoot another album cover.”

Dill asserts that taking pictures has always been and always will be a passion. The fact that his existence as a skater led to a job as a designer is something he has only recently come to terms with. “It’s funny to say out loud! Where was I qualified to be a designer? I didn’t go to school for it. But over time I ended up making so much stuff that here I am now,” says Dill. Of course, amid all the hype generated by Fucking Awesome, not to mention the book, all 2,000 copies of which will surely sell out, it’s easy to forget that Dill is and was an exceptionally talented and even groundbreaking skateboarder. What does he make of his legacy, now that he’s entering elder statesman territory? “If anyone ever likes anything that I did on a skateboard, I’m very happy.” And is he still skating, or, now that the book is out, is he going back to being a designer full-time? You always want to keep them guessing.”