Andrew Peters: 20 Year Issue
Photos by Sam Muller. Interview by Campbell Milligan.
This interview appears in the 20th-anniversary Issue (buy a copy here) and is apart of the Analog To Digital: 20 Years of Culture and Change Podcast Series (listen to it here).
This introduction will open with a very lofty but very true claim about Peters, and the claim is this: Andrew James Peters has defined Monster Children’s photographic style.
Again, lofty, but true. I’m hard pressed to think of someone apart from the two founders, Campbell and Chris, who has had a greater influence on this magazine’s visual identity. Out of our twenty long years, Peters has been around for eighteen? Nineteen of those? To put it even more imprecisely but more understandably: Andrew Peters has been a massive part of Monster Children for as long as we can remember.
Peters’ work is insightful and intimate, and considers not just the subject, but the world that they exist in. It is not only a kickflip - it is a setting and an environment and a time and a place. People walk by, the aging brick of the buildings in the background offer context as to the difficulty, but also something more abstract: the mood of the trick. His portraiture is candid and playful and without his work, we’d be lost. Children wandering in the dark with no sense of composition or gradient or the proper way to set up a flash.
So first question, what were you doing in 2003?
I was in grade nine at Newtown Performing Arts High School. I was playing the trumpet in the orchestra, the symphonic wind ensemble, the stage band, the jazz band. I was in the choirs. I was a studious student. I hadn't started skateboarding yet and I hadn't picked up a camera yet.
Do you still play like any instrument now?
I still muck around on the guitar occasionally. If our niece is over, we'll try and write a song or something.
You no desire to jump back into that world again?
I've always had the desire to but it's hard when you're focused on one career to shift your focus into another, especially another creative field. I have like tinkered with it over the last couple of years.
You sang the Team Average song?
I did sing the Team Average song. That's one of the rare recordings you'll hear me sing.
When you say you hadn’t start skating again. Did you stop skating?
Yeah I had a problem with my knee called Osgood Schlatter so I had to stop all sports. I was already really good friends with Chima Ferguson so once I decided to skate again, I was skating with all those dudes in the city again. By the time I kind of came back to it, he was already so good, so I was like, damn, I'm gonna have to pick something else up to keep up. That was the initial catalyst for me to pick up a camera to be able to stay in the mix.
Speaking to a lot of skate and surf photographers and filmers, a lot of them started filming because the people around them started doing tricks where they were just like I’m not going to be able to do that, was that what it was like for you?
Yeah pretty much, honestly. I really loved skateboarding, but I didn't really have the drive to throw myself down everything and get that into it. I wasn't as naturally talented and I had a lot of other hobbies as well. I was really keen on art, design, magazines and all that stuff already. So it just naturally lent itself into me wanting to be on the creative side of skateboarding in general. By default I was around Chima, and he went on to become one of the best skaters to come out of Sydney. So having that as your reference point was like, I got no fucking chance. Impossible really. So my focus just went straight to photography.
And how did you start with that?
Everyone was on this forum called skateboard.com.au. You'd go home and gossip about what's going on in the skate scene at night. They did a monthly photo competition so I entered even though I'd never taken a photo before. My dad had Minolta SLR and I asked to borrow it. I shot a photo of Jamie Hawley heel flipping over the silver rail in Sydney and submitted it to the competition and won. My first roll of film ever. That's all I really needed. I won a free skateboard deck. Winning any product at that age is crazy. Then I did work experience in year 10 at Juice Clothing with Guy Miller, who was one of Chima's sponsors. My Auntie had a darkroom at her house and I printed out this photo that I'd shot of Chima as a thank you to give to Guy. Without me knowing he gave that to Sean Holland at Australian Skateboarding Magazine (ASM). It was Chima's first interview and they ran that photo. So I had my first photo published in a magazine when I was fifteen. I had no idea it was coming out. I just opened the mag to see Chima's interview and was like holy shit that's my photo.
So you went from being a classic Sydney skater guy to moving to LA and having to start a the bottom of the ladder, how did you navigate that?
Well when I watched Chima quit his job and drop out of school to focus on skate and see all the success he was having over in the US I was like I have to get over there too. It was like a right of passage. I went and stayed with Matt Mumford and Chad Barty. I knew Dustin Dolan and he got me in with the Baker crew so there was people for me to go and skate and shoot photos with. The best guys straight out of high school. I knew that was a huge opportunity and I somehow accidentally got a work visa. I applied for a visa thinking that I was applying for six months thing but it was for five years. So when that got approved I was like well let’s go.
Obviously there’s too many photos to cover, but what three photos are moments where you felt like you were progressing and owning your space?
Number one always is the Brian De La Torre rooftop cover of Skateboarder Magazine. That was my first American cover. At the time I'd already been shooting photos with flashes and then I decided to kind of strip back and just shoot natural light, black and white photos. For nearly two years I didn’t use flash. I was shooting blurry grainy photos and the fact that they put that on the cover was really cool.
Yeah that was a really identifiable cover. Could really tell it was an Andrew Peters shot. It wasn't so much that it was a crazy trick, even though it was on a rooftop, it was more a creative image. They'd been images similar but nothing was shot like that composition wise.
Yeah the feedback on it was so positive. People saying ‘this is one of the sickest skate covers ever’ and I was just like, what the fuck? I was 21 and just like that I felt like I'd hit the big leagues. I'd had covers in Australia but getting one in the US was huge. I had an interview with Jamie Thomas in the same magazine where we'd shot a similar all black and white photo, mostly natural light. I felt like I had something to offer. People started to expect it and they started to trust me with what I was doing. Just felt like I found my style. I think all my proudest moments come down to firsts. The first ever ad with Ryan Baczynski in - a DC shoes ad. It was the very first photo I shot with a Hasselblad, with the flash working. Everything came together. The sky was exposed correctly and the photo was sharp enough. He was a good friend. I miss him dearly. That photo had a big impact on me because it made me go I can do this. I also got paid probably like $1500 which at the time was pretty big deal.
What did you spend the $1,500 on?
Probably camera gear at that point in time because I was too young to start drinking piss.
Yeah, right and the third moment?
Fuck, I actually always think of the Sean Pablo cover of Monster Children, where it was just the torso shot. I'd just moved to LA and I was just hanging out with these kids that were on the come up. They had become sponsored by Supreme and there was a bit of energy surrounding them. That photo seemed to encapsulate that. There wasn’t a skateboard in sight, but you knew that he was riding a skateboard just by his posture and what not. The fact that you guys ran it on a cover was so cool. It not needing to to be a skateboarding trick or tick all these conventional blue sky boxes that normally we'd have to adhere to as a photographer to get a photo published. It encouraged me to start focusing on that stuff. Equally the Andrew Allen cover, lying on the ground with All Your Heroes Are Dead type. That was the first roll of film that I had shot in ages. That photo really struck me with all it’s mood, grain and softness which really made me go, fuck digitial. I totally shifted back to film since.
To me those photos really captured the emotion of what skateboarding is to people that actually skateboard.
Yeah and I think there was a lot of emotion flying around at that time because Dylan Rieder had just passed away. Obviously I think that was a bit of a reference to that with the All Your Heroes Are Dead on the cover. My biggest fuck up was probably realising that moments were the most important moments a little bit too late and only really being focused on tricks for the first ten years of my shooting career. It took friends passing away to realise that I'd missed shooting the most important moments of our friendships. You can't get that back. I'm shooting photos now in preparation for my friends to leave us. But shit man, like all those fucking times we spent together? Maybe that's half the reason why some of those times were so special because we didn't have cameras out. We will forget about the tricks in five years time. These days you forget about the tricks in a week but you don't forget the moments before and after, the nights in between when you went skating.
Yeah your photos really do capture that. What has changed in the skate photography industry over the last 20 years for you?
The internet's been the biggest change because everything started to become way more accessible. Having a constant feed of stuff became the norm and what everybody expected. You used to be able to work on a much bigger body of work and it was much more special then. You would grow up watching videos over and over and over again, the production value on those was really special. The guys that put the time into make those videos really gave a fuck you know? You didn't just pick up a camera, you had to commit your whole life. With everything becoming so accessible it’s become a bit more redundant. There are people who really do put all the effort in and unfortunately it doesn't stick around anymore. It has made it less interesting to me over the years, to be honest.
Yeah what you were saying before about how someone will land a trick and it’s gone within a week, it’s in and out so fast.
Someone can work on a video part for two years and then it's literally only going to be on the internet like for a couple of days. It’ll be front page of the web for a week max. Whereas, I grew up on watching videos like until the heads on the VCR were burnt through, you know.
What does it take these days for something to stick with skateboarding?
I think it's really hard for something to stick around and really make an impact. Even for me, just being forced to put our my own publication, with Please Don’t Forget This. There was so much effort that went into making the video for Former with Austyn Gillete and Jake Anderson but when it came out it lasted a week, whereas the book itself lasted months. So now it’s about putting tangible things out. I have no doubt there will be new iterations of how we view skateboarding and the way that people like to memorialize skateboarding. At the moment it’s in a weird funk, shit ain't as special as it used to be.
Even I printed out a bunch of personal photos the other day and just to have the physical photo is so cool as opposed to scrolling it on a screen. Magazines are really hard to make, but when a photo is printed it changes the life of it a lot more.
For sure. Especially with photographs looking at it in a magazine, you're smelling it, you're feeling it, and you're looking at it. Three senses engaged which is going to trigger some different stuff in your brain that induces some feelings towards it and it becomes more nostalgic. I remember sitting on the couch when one of the issues of Monster Children had just come in and I was showing to my partner Jordan, and she was like, man, it smells so good. Fuck yeah, it smells so much better than the internet, doesn't it? I don't think that's going anywhere either. People still love to touch something, feel it, and literally smell it. The rip in the page, it’s faded, or handed on - it all adds to the to experience
Going back to how technology has changed, I feel like you answered this to a degree but you’re one of those people that went analog to digital and then back to analog. Why is that?
Everything really counts with film. You need to learn all the technical stuff otherwise you fuck everything up and you're wasting money. With digital you can chuck a flash here, point your camera there, yeah it looks pretty good, move on. It becomes less intentional. There's positive aspects to that but it definitely becomes way less intentional. You're not picking a film stock that you want it to look like. Of course, when you move into the commercial world of photography, you're working for a client that needs something specific done for them and they generally want you to shoot digital, so you just kind of like bow down to it because that's your job, you know? Even with magazines there isn’t budgets anymore to provide the photographers with film or to do the scans and everything became more expensive as the labs started to shut down, everything became less accessible in the analog world. Why would we pay for that expense when we're getting pretty much the same thing out of a digital thing? In that revelation we didn't realize what was so special about it. It took going back to moments shooting film where I realised how much it makes me slow down and really think about what I’m doing in a totally different way, to shoot with intention. That’s what was missing in my digital work. Yeah, you can make a digital photo look kind of like a film photo in post, but you can't get the same reaction out of somebody when you’re pointing a digital camera at them. The reaction is completely different.
Yeah and you really leaned into capturing the moments. I really like the fact that your lens changed to that world.
Yeah it was definitely conscious. It had a lot to do with shooting film. You've only got a certain amount of photos and you have to make it count.
What advice would you give to your 2003 self?
You truly don't know shit yet. And you probably never will. But at the same time, fuck, I don't know the aggrogance actually helped me figure some shit out as well. There's pros and cons.
I feel like you need to have that confidence, especially in the creative industry, to back yourself in a way.
Yeah I was lucky enough to be surrounded by really talented skateboarders and musicians and artists but it was mostly just being in the right place. Hanging out, creating friendships building trust with so that they were comfortable with you then pointing a camera at them. That’s my advice to people. Do the thing you want and surround yourself with the people you want to be with.
Finally, what is Monster Children to you?
Monster Children to me is the inspiring but tough big brother. Everything he does is cool. Sometimes he tackles you out of the blue with layouts but he makes you think about how to push the boundaries a bit more, how to catch his eye. Monster Children really pushed me to figure out the next thing all the time. It’s always gonna be this thing that I'm really proud to be related to.
