Disposable: Ben Chadourne

At the park in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago, I overheard two kids talking about skate videos.

They were talking about the parts that they love, and the parts that they are excited to see. One of them talked about how they were excited to see the new Ben Chadourne part (starring Hjalte, linked above), which was interesting to me because Ben isn’t the one skating in the video, he is the one filming. In an enormously saturated market of skateboarding videos made easy and disposable by the internet, there are thousands and thousands of skate content creators putting out clips that are absolute shit (blah blah blah yaddah yaddah complaining about the saturated skate media landscape again), so shit in fact that certain filmers have become known themselves as quality producers; people to return to, to admire, to look forward to. Ben Chadourne is one of those filmers.

I leaned in and told one of the kids that I was also a fan of Ben and that I had recently mailed him a couple of disposable cameras to shoot for this article. They asked why I was talking to them, and I told them I just overheard what they were saying and thought they might be interested to know. One of the kids said, ‘no I mean why are you talking to us, we are kids . What are you even doing here? You can barely even skate. What’re you, like, fifty?’ and I said, ‘bitch I’m thirty I was crooked grinding before you were even spewed from your mother fuck you,’ and then I tried to skate off but I hit a pebble before I could get any speed so I lunged out and hit my nose on the ground really fucking hard and the kids laughed and so I sprung up off the ground - my face covered in blood and tears - and I focused my board and shouted, ‘you’re next!’ and they ran off.

Anyway, I mailed Ben some disposable cameras and gave him a month to shoot them. Here’s what he came back with.