Eric Antoine was one of the main European skateboard photographers from the end of the ’90s till 2011. For nearly 15 years you could find his photos in all the magazines and he was constantly touring the planet. At some point he stopped, moved to the countryside, and focused on a totally different kind of photography, experimenting with old ultra large format cameras like were used in the 19th Century. We visited him at home near Strasbourg in the Vosges, where he now lives with his partner and daughter in the house he renovated himself.
When we arrive in Strasbourg we go straight to a skate session since the weather forecast says rain for the following days. Eric and his skate friend Pierre have prepared a slappy spot under a bridge, and they’re super motivated. The winter break has been long. It’s a slappy paradise and we have a long session there. It’s the first one of the year for Eric and you can see the joy on his face. He’s 51 years old but on a skateboard, he has the energy of a teenager. He tries to skate as much as he can. It helps that he built a little skatepark in his garden (which we sadly can not skate, because of the weather). The village Eric lives in is located on a mountain in the middle of the forest. In the late 19th/early 20th century it was a summer retreat for rich people. You can still see the beautiful buildings from the Belle Époque in the village. It’s a quiet life, not many people around, but that’s how Eric likes it nowadays. When we take a break from shooting for this article, we go for a hike through the forest and Eric shows us the trees he takes photos of. He’s liked documenting them over the years. We cross a creek where he puts his feet in to cool down his ankles that hurt from skating and he convinces us to lay down in the damp moss and look into the treetops swaying in the wind, to enjoy the tranquility of nature. Afterwards we enjoy some cheese, made by a local farmer – a friend of Eric’s – and a glass of Pinot Noir. These are worthy conditions to produce an article. It feels like Eric has figured out how to live the good life.
"We say, party like it’s the last day on Earth, but it’s like skate like it’s the last day you skate."
Every morning I wake my daughter and we walk through the forest to bring her to school. I usually try to hike a little bit on the way back home and think about the rest of the day. If the weather is okay to shoot with collodion then it’s a photo day – because I need a white sky with clouds, but very bright. It has to be a beautiful day, but cloudy, because I use only natural light so the light is very dark, very contrasted, very strong, my days depend on the weather forecast. Yesterday I sanded some frames, I framed some photos, I worked on a book project, I sometimes retouch some scans, I scan photos, I do inventory of the photos I shot in the past months, or I prepare photos in the studio. There are plenty of things to do. I also take care of logistics to send the photos to the gallery. I think in a year I probably have less than 50 days where I can shoot photos and I probably take 20 photos. And yeah, this is what I do. And of course, when it’s sunny and I have the time, the first thing I think about is: Can I skate? Not if I can take a photo.
I don’t know if it’s the fear of not being able to skate anymore. We say, party like it’s the last day on Earth, but it’s like skate like it’s the last day you skate. When I was a skate photographer, you see so much amazing skateboarding, and you’re not gonna do a crooked grind on a little curb next to someone who just did a kickflip backside tailslide on a ten stair rail. When I would come home from trips we would mostly skate mini ramps, but I really don’t like to skate parks anymore because when you’re a 50 year old, you don’t really want to deal with 30 year old parents and their kids.
My partner, when we renovated the house, she noticed that I didn’t skate anymore because I had to drive an hour to go to a place where I could skate. So I was kind of depressed and she said, “For your birthday I’ll ask people to come here and help you”, and she actually raised money to buy a cement mixer. A lot of good friends helped me. Nicolas Schneider from Vertical Skate Ramps designed it with me and Oli Buergin checked if it was possible to make it and Pudi made the pool copings. And all of my friends from the region came to help. And now I have my own concrete skatepark at home.
My friend Pierre, a great skater from Paris, moved here and we opened some spots in the city together, sanded, grinded, and waxed some curbs.
"One doesn’t need to leave to go on vacation when living here."
First of all, we moved here because the light is crazy. We are above the clouds most of the time, so we have more beautiful days. And we live in a forest, so you have the advantage that even if it rains, it’s a good feeling. I hate to use these words, but there is something really healing and a special energy in the forest. I like to be high on the mountain, I could never live on the flat again. I really enjoy being in the forest, and if you look at my photos, it’s me, it’s where I live. I shoot trees that are 100 meters from my house. I just go out the door and I have trees, so they are my subjects. I stopped shooting photos of people. I have the forest and stones and all the elements. I really enjoy it. One doesn’t need to leave to go on vacation when living here.
My neighbor’s place was a big hunter’s house, owned by a German lord in the early 20th century. He built three houses and my house was the stable and also the house of the horse’s groomers. It was in really bad condition when I bought it but It’s got a lot of space and wood beams so I was sure I could make it look great with a bit of work. Little by little we renovated with the help of friends and cheap contractors. We used a lot of reclaimed wood and stuff we found, furniture we found. Most of the furniture is reclaimed or found in flea markets. Now I have a studio here, I have a nice atelier. I have a lot of space to shoot.
The furniture and all the things that are here sort of happened because I was using this photography process. My house, my life, and my photography are very related. When I was looking for these 19th century lenses or cameras, I dug everywhere and at the same time, I discovered some furniture because people who have the lenses were old people who had old furniture and sometimes I bought it from them. Nowadays the cameras look old, but they’re made for me in Bulgaria by a really good woodworker. It looks old, but it’s very modern. And the process is old, but I use it in a very contemporary way. I’m not drawn to the process because it’s old, not at all. I am drawn to it because of its precision. The deep blacks, the texture, the silvery aspect and all the details you can get. And also, at first, I think I was very attracted to it because it was time consuming. When I first moved to the countryside in 2010, I had a lot of time on my hands. I was not going on trips anymore, and doing this just took so much of my time. When you’re doing this, you don’t think about other things. I guess I was escaping some thoughts, so I put it all in there and it worked.
I mean, I never studied and I was not meant to be an artist or to consider myself this. I work with galleries who sell my work, so I guess I am defined as an artist now. It’s the definition of what I do. I sell artwork for a living. But yeah, Yes, I don’t even see myself as a photographer too much lately because my work with photography now is more like a way to reflect on the intrinsic qualities of photography, its essence, find out what the limits of photography are. I often don’t even shoot an object or anything real. Lately, I am not interested much in representing reality. I am drawn to geometry and nature of course but I also build layered compositions to express symbolically the passage of time… to represent my life or other people’s lives without showing them, in a subtle way. I actually don’t only use this process, I make a lot of different experiments with photography, negative or positive – and I also paint. But yeah, I guess I’m kind of stuck in this wet collodion process now because this is what I’m known for and this is what people want. And I’m also stuck in it because I can’t find anything else that is as attractive to me. I think skate photography with medium format cameras kind of taught me what I do now. I was always experimenting because you have the skate part, but you also had the lifestyle part, all the incidentals, all the portraits, and I was always trying something new for that. I would do a polaroid portrait, I would modify my lenses, do a different type of printing, or try different cameras, different formats. I kept doing the same thing, except I started building cameras and experimenting with bigger and bigger formats. Now I am where I am, but I have the feeling that I still do it the same way I was doing it with skateboarding, because I never really did digital photos. Actually, when it happened, I stopped.
My dad gave me a camera so I had been taking photos of my friends with a shitty camera since the early 90’s. I was experimenting and a friend of mine taught me how to use a darkroom, so I also had a darkroom very early. Then I went to New York from ’95 until ’97. I was going back and forth there and then I met people like Thomas Campbell or Benjamin Deberdt who really influenced me and pushed me to take skate photos. I got my first Nikon FM2 in ’96 and started hanging out around Supreme and all the local spots and I shot people like Harold Hunter, Jamie Story, or Quim Cardona, who were hot at that time in New York and magazines were interested. One of my first photos with flashes was the cover of the second Sugar magazine. After that I kept going and I think I had over 4,000 pages in magazines over the years. I took skate photos professionally for around 15 years. After New York I met Oli Buergin in Switzerland, we started skating together, taking photos and then I was traveling with him going to California, meeting P-Stone, Rhino, good skateboarders. Then Oli started SoleTech Europe and we worked together. I stayed 12 or 13 years in the company, traveled so much, and it was before the internet so you could work with many magazines in many countries. It was sort of like one article for everybody. I managed to make a good living and travel the world, but I stopped at the end of 2011.
"I had over 4,000 pages in magazines over the years."
First of all, something happened in my personal life that made me want to change my life. I had kind of a regret of not spending more time with the people I loved and being on the road all the time. Also I was getting older and I was already very interested in art, literature, and food. I was going on a trip with young people and I wanted to eat good food, drink good wine, and read, to discover the landscape, discover some things in the city. When you travel with people who don’t have this interest, it can be annoying for them. I think I grew older and then I thought it was not my place anymore to be there. There were also a couple of incidents on some trips and I was taking it very deeply and personally. There was one trip where it really hurt me, that I was not getting along with the people I travelled with. I didn’t like that I couldn’t choose who I traveled with. I think you should shoot photos with your friends, those are the best photos you will take. I loved my jobs and the people I traveled with but if you work for companies, you can’t get along with everybody, and then sometimes there were tensions. I wanted to try to do another kind of photography and to slow down as well. I think that, even though it was a luxury to do so, I was tired of traveling and I was tired of the cities and had already moved to the countryside. When you’re 40 years old and you’re still traveling all the time, you can’t really have a family or take care of your house, do stuff that old people do.
"I don’t really accept flaws. I was the same with skate photography."
Yes, I’ve been painting for a bit more than three years now. I do it on and off. I always was interested in paintings, ceramics, sculptures, and different kinds of artforms, and then I met some people who were painting and I saw a lot of freedom in their practice. I don’t have a lot of emancipation in my practice. It’s very complicated and you never know what you’re gonna get, even if you master the process. There’s always a surprise with chemicals, with the weather, and painting was very relaxing when I tried. I discovered some painters that I loved and then I really felt an attraction to abstract painting. I always have the feeling that abstract photography looks like fake paintings. I don’t really like photographs that try to imitate paintings, so I figured I should paint. Painting is kind of a relief. At first I was doing whatever, trying to find my way but my intentions became more and more precise and I got more demanding. I guess in any practice I am kind of messy, I stick to a DIY state of mind, but I still want to achieve the result that I have in mind and stay very precise. I don’t really accept flaws. I was the same with skate photography. I knew what I wanted and if a ray of light would appear, I was not happy with it, even if it was a good accident. I don’t really tolerate or embrace happy accidents, even though I know I should. When I was a skate photographer, maybe I was annoying to the people I was traveling with, because I was very controlling or had high expectations and they just wanted to have fun on a skate trip. But for me, even if it was fun, it was still a job and my clients had expectations. I still think that I was very professional.
The process I use most of the time is called wet plate collodion on glass. It is exactly as it sounds, a wet emulsion on glass, in ultra large field cameras. These cameras are usually very heavy. I mean, they are made for a 40 centimeter glass negative. I started with original 19th century cameras and the biggest one I got was 25 kilos. You can’t carry it. Then I saw a post of a guy who made a camera in Bulgaria and I contacted him to ask if he could make a lighter camera. He accepted a lot of the features I proposed and now he’s already made three very functional beauties for me. And honestly, I love these cameras. I will have the third one soon, he’s building it right now. If I didn’t have these cameras, I don’t think I would take as much pleasure shooting photos. It’s nice when you can control the whole process, from building the camera to framing the photos. I also make my own chemicals, I don’t depend on any brand. Even the lenses I use are very special, they have a different aspect than the contemporary ones. They have a very different bokeh and just capture light differently. And then there is the whole process of shooting with field cameras, it needs to be very thought out, it’s definitely not snapshot compatible. The results are like nothing else. The plates are very silvery, almost three-dimensional. They go from negative to positive in the very overexposed parts. It’s impossible to replicate. You can get an extremely sharp photo with a Hasselblad medium format, but it’s a different sharpness. With the collodion plates, you have the impression that you can actually enter the image. It’s an experience. It has this tangible, more material feel. The actual artwork comes in an oak frame, which I build with a friend from around here, and it’s very heavy, very tangible. You feel the matter. You feel glass, you feel silver, you feel wood and it’s almost alive. I don’t know how to compare that. It’s like, you prefer having a great meal with an amazing cheese that was made by someone who knows how to do it – you don’t eat pills. The result would be the same, you’re fed. But if you eat well, it’s a different experience. Looking at a photo on a small screen is the equivalent of food pills for me.
"With the collodion plates, you have the impression that you can actually enter the image."
The way Eric takes his photos – ambrotypes – is a very artisanal process. He shoots on glass plates that are both a positive and a negative on the same medium (the negative turns positive when you put it on a black background). To do this, he has to mix the chemicals in the precise ratios himself, which must be done days in advance. Depending on how long he lets the mixture sit, he controls the density and contrast. He is dependent on a specific temperature and a certain kind of light at his home, and therefore only shoots between 12 and 2 PM. Once the photo is taken, he has to act quickly to develop it, which is why he usually shoots near his house. When he wants to take pictures further away, he travels in his van, a retired ambulance which he has equipped with a darkroom. During the weekend of our visit, the weather was unfortunately not ideal; to take a shot, he had to use artificial light, which he normally doesn't do. Artificial lighting makes the images appear flatter than natural light, but it was just a test to get started again after the winter. He prefers not to shoot with collodion in winter or summer, as the conditions aren't right. He strives for the highest quality, and if a picture has even minor flaws, he repeats the process until it is perfect. He is in full control of the entire process and is not dependent on, for example, a specific film remaining in production. He even crafts his own frames and packs them in boxes himself to send them out to his clients worldwide. He also likes to do photobooks so that people that can’t afford an original ambrotype of his are able to get a look at his work. With the books, he also wants to achieve the highest printing quality. He’s currently working on a new book that will come out soon, the third one in a series of five. He plans to release the last one when he’s around 70, so we know there’s more to come from him. How his photos will look by then is not clear yet. He started with portraits but stopped shooting photos of humans in 2014, and has been getting more and more abstract over time. Now he takes portraits of stacks of books or tree trunks. They represent stories for him, just as the face of a person, with all its wrinkles and scars would do. The use of symbols is constant in his work. What will be next, even Eric himself doesn’t know, but it’s safe to say that he’ll keep on skating as long as possible.
