In 1977, California recorded its driest year of the twentieth century. The state banned filling backyard swimming pools. Surfers, stranded when the ocean went flat, had been calling skateboarding "sidewalk surfing" since the 1950s — a way to stay sharp between swells. Now, with thousands of kidney-shaped pools sitting empty across Southern California, they started jumping fences.
The kids who dropped into those drained pools — Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Stacy Peralta, the Zephyr team out of Santa Monica — were considered criminals at the time. They'd scout neighborhoods, hop fences, skate until the cops showed up, then vanish. The curved walls of the pools mimicked the feeling of carving a wave.
A 2023 Cambridge University study confirmed what everyone suspected: professional skateboarding could only have emerged from this specific collision of drought, surf culture, and California's entrepreneurial risk-taking. "You could have had the same drought, the same pools in somewhere like Phoenix," the researchers noted, "but since Phoenix doesn't have an embedded surf culture, professional skateboarding couldn't have originated there."
Amir Zaki grew up in that tradition. He skated the streets and backyard ramps of Beaumont, California in the 1980s — the generation just after the pool riders. He went on to study photography at UCLA and spent years shooting the California landscape: lifeguard towers, suburban architecture, the strange beauty of overlooked structures. His work is held by the Whitney, LACMA, and the New Museum.
For California Concrete, Zaki returned to twelve skateparks across the state, from San Diego to Sacramento. He arrived at dawn, before anyone else, and climbed into the empty bowls alone. Each image is a composite of dozens of shots stitched together — a technique that flattens and exaggerates space simultaneously, creating an uncanny stillness.
Tony Hawk wrote the introduction. He described seeing Zaki's photographs of the empty parks and open skies, and how they brought back the feeling of his first visit to a skatepark as a kid — watching skaters launch out of the concrete and thinking they looked like birds.
The book also includes an essay by Los Angeles architect Peter Zellner, who traces how skateparks evolved alongside the sport itself — how every transition, hip, coping, spine, and kidney shape serves a purpose, designed in collaboration between architects, engineers, and the skaters who actually ride them.
What Zaki captured isn't action photography. There are no skaters in these images. Instead, you see the parks as spaces — sculptural, worn, waiting. The concrete holds decades of use. The morning light fills the bowls. It's a book about potential energy, about what these places mean when no one is there.
California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks
Amir Zaki, with essays by Tony Hawk and Peter Zellner
Hardcover, 96 pages. Published by Merrell, 2019.
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This is part of Pemulis Peripheral Perspectives — a never-ending series of musings on our favorite artists, weirdos, and the things they leave behind. Pemulis Water & Power, 4051 Judah Street, San Francisco.