Photography gave Ethan Allen a way to stay close to skateboarding when he could no longer skate. An ankle injury in his early teens kept him off his board, but he still wanted to spend time with his friends. He began photographing them and other skateboarders around the city while he waited to recover. What started as a way to remain part of that world became a practice of its own.
Skateboarding continues to shape his photographs, even when there is no skateboard in the frame. It taught him to look closely at the built environment: to notice forms, surfaces and relationships that might otherwise pass unnoticed. That attention now connects his architectural photographs with his still-life work. More recently, it has also raised a question: what happens to the pictures that do not fit the work you already know how to make?
A city seen through skateboarding
Allen describes skateboarders as people who are already unusually attentive to their surroundings. They perceive the built environment differently because they move through it differently. In his own work, that awareness has developed into an interest in architectural shapes and abstract views.
Carrying a camera intensifies the search. He finds himself looking for alignments between intersecting shapes, colours and lines, while watching how light interacts with what is around him. A building becomes a set of possible relationships within the frame.
His personal work centres on architectural photography, while his commercial practice includes still life and architecture. The connection between them begins with this way of noticing. The subject may change, but the attention to how forms sit together remains.
Ten years of Romance in Geometry
His series Romance in Geometry gives that approach its clearest expression. Allen has worked on it for ten years, making photographs of architectural details in which shapes, colours and lines come together as new abstract images. It is his longest-running project and continues to influence how he photographs other subjects.
The project also leaves space for the viewer. Allen hopes that someone encountering his personal work will let their mind wander through the possibilities suggested by the details and shapes. Recognition of the original building is not the only way into a photograph; the relationships inside the image can become something to explore in their own right.
A slower rhythm, and the feeling of a space
“I find analogue teaches me patience,” Allen says. In his experience, working on film encourages him to slow down, consider what he is photographing and think about how to approach it. He describes the process as almost meditative.
This is a description of what analogue photography gives him personally. His answers place the emphasis on attention and intention: taking time to decide what matters before making a picture.
That care extends beyond the arrangement of lines. When photographing interiors and architecture, he wants to evoke the feelings a space might provoke in someone. He is drawn to liminal spaces and the emotions they can produce in a viewer. A photograph can be formally precise while still leaving its atmosphere open to interpretation.
Letting another genre change the picture
One photograph of his friend Tyjae skating in San Francisco marks an important shift. The Golden Gate Bridge stretches across the background while Tyjae skates in the foreground. Allen had become less inspired by the familiar low angles and fisheye compositions he associated with traditional skate photography. Looking at other genres offered another way forward.
He began asking what a skate photograph might look like through the eyes of a landscape photographer, or someone working in another field. The photograph could hold the action and its surroundings together. For Allen, borrowing those ways of composing opened his vision and encouraged him to experiment further.
Assisting other photographers brought a different kind of expansion. Working alongside people whose work he admired introduced him to commercial still life and lifestyle photography. As he developed his understanding of lighting and composition, he combined those skills with the architectural approach he had already been building.
Making room for photographs that do not fit
Allen is now exploring the idea of making more photographs for memory. He is conscious of the tension between recording life and experiencing it, and does not want to spend his life looking through a lens. Yet the discipline of photographing only with a clear intention can create a different restriction.
It is possible, he explains, to stop making certain pictures because you cannot see where they belong in the wider body of your work. That refusal may also close off a new approach before you have had a chance to discover it.
The question remains open in his answers. A long-running project can sharpen a way of seeing; everyday photographs can make room for something that has not yet become a project. Allen is trying to give both kinds of attention a place in his practice.
His story offers a useful question to carry into the next roll: are you leaving a photograph unmade because it does not interest you, or because it does not fit what you already make? For Allen, the possibilities of a picture still matter, whether they begin with a familiar architectural shape or a moment he wants to remember.
Based on a written interview for Developing Stories, Berlin Photo Studio’s series about the people and experiences behind photographs. Interview and editing: Emiliano Vittoriosi / Berlin Photo Studio. Photographs: Ethan Allen.
