It’s not tasteless y’all. It’s worse to be skating spots like that and completely ignore the surroundings as if no one is suffering right now; literally the entire planet is fucked. It’s like a gross whitewash/visual gentrification to pretend people aren’t camped out there smoking rock in the middle of the day when that’s the stone cold reality. Skateboarding is a part of street culture, just like graffiti, and yes homelessness. Street skating videos are just that, a documentation of street culture. He’s providing visibility to the social underbelly everyone chooses to disregard like trash, and in turn sparking a conversation about how fucked it all is. It’s good that these images upset you, they should be upsetting, but it’s shortsighted to say it’s tasteless or indefensible. I also want to be explicitly clear that it is extremely easy to completely exploit homelessness in skate videos and it happens regularly, but this ain’t it. Go scold GX for vollies instead.
Well okay, here's my response. Respectfully Matt, I don't see street skating (videos) as a documentation of street culture - I see them as a documentation of skateboarding. Yes, skating is part of the streets, it's part of the underground, but that doesn't mean we need to showcase every single other part of what happens in the streets.
And why do we watch skate vids? We watch them for entertainment. To get excited, stoked on skating. To me, it's incongruous to add lots of footage of those less fortunate because I don't believe that a skate video is a compatible medium to spark conversation about the wounded underbelly of a society,
unless a clear point is made from the beginning of the video that that is in fact the intended point. And lots of videos do that properly. That's why I'm uncomfortable with the footage - not because I turn my head at the sight of a homeless person.
If we don't have that understanding of what we're watching from the beginning, then it smacks of immaturity and wanting to use footage of the homeless because it's "entertaining." Honestly it reminds me of a small local video I watched many years back where the kids in the video were filming a man with a mental illness for fun, and even though he told them to stop, they continued to film while giggling. Not too far removed.
Also, I'm not against critiquing other videos for their at-times gratuitous footage of the homeless. I wasn't totally comfortable with Gerwer's instagram account years back either, for example. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy other output from GX or Sabotage or whomever, I'll enjoy watching the skating, but yeah - it does turn me off from being really stoked on them. That's how I feel.
And remember in Guy Mariano's Epicly Later'd when O'Dell was filming the homeless in LA as he was driving by in his car, and a guy literally screamed at him "Don't be filming me motherfucker?" Do you think homeless people
appreciate being filmed? Like they want the nadir of their existence recorded and put on display? Do you think that man thought for a second that his image and situation was going to be used for a greater purpose and that it was all right? It's not as one-sided as some make it seem.