Deanna Templeton

Photographer Deanna Templeton (USA, 1969) is best known for her street pictures documenting everyday suburban life in Southern California and the skate and beach scene of Huntington Beach, a city where she has lived all her life. Through her personal and sensitive approach to her often youthful subjects, Templeton manages to show a different side of these subcultures, away from the stereotype of virile skate heroes and sexy bikini babes. Her portraits of strangers she met while accompanying her husband (former professional skater turned street photographer and artist Ed Templeton) on skate tours or during the couples’ daily walk on the pier close to their home, are often made into series dealing with identity and body image.

In ‘What She Said’ (a title taken from a song by The Smiths) – Templeton’s second solo exhibition at Gallery FIFTY ONE – the artist shows the timeless portraits she made of young girls on the streets of the US, Europe and Russia alongside gig flyers and her own teenage journal entries from the mid to late eighties. The latter range from the melodramatic to the deeply disturbing and testify to her intense struggles with her self-image. By combining egodocuments with street portraits, this moving series sheds a light on the universal experience of (female) adolescence and the challenges, the joys and the pains of growing up; a subject that often goes unnoticed.

In ‘The Swimming Pool’ – a sun-lit series of colour, black-and-white and Polaroid pictures – Templeton shows different models photographed from above while swimming naked in her pool. She was inspired for this project after she shot a picture of her husband, professional skateboarder and artist Ed Templeton (US, 1972), skinny dipping in their pool, and was intrigued by the way the light was reflected in the water. Over the next eight summers, from 2007 until 2015, Templeton invited her friends and acquaintances to do the same, encouraging them to express themselves in the water. The one-on-one connection between the photographer and the naked model resulted in intimate pictures that simultaneously capture the feeling of freedom, weightlessness and total isolation from the outside world one experiences while being alone under water.