Decades of documenting US skateboard culture from a woman’s perspective

One day in 1995, when Mag­dale­na Wosin­s­ka was 12 years old, she approached the group of skater boys at her Ari­zona school. Her fam­i­ly had moved from Katow­ice in Poland to the USA only a few years before, and since then, she had strug­gled to accli­ma­tise to her new desert surroundings.

“When you’re an eight-year-old kid and you’re super com­fort­able at home and you get to Amer­i­ca, you’re like: ​‘What the fuck is this? I don’t under­stand what lan­guage you guys are speak­ing, your clothes are weird, every­one is weird,’” Wosin­s­ka recalls. ​“That cul­ture shock I think irked me for the rest of my life because kids are mean, they bul­ly you if you eat dif­fer­ent food and you don’t speak Eng­lish so it’s not easy to fit in.”

That day though, she was deter­mined to change the nar­ra­tive. With short spiky hair, and clutch­ing a skate­board that her father recent­ly bought her, she said to the boys ​“look, I’m one of you guys, let’s be friends”, before push­ing off on the board and almost as quick­ly end­ing up splayed across the floor. They didn’t want to be her friend, and she was resigned to going to the skatepark on her own and teach­ing her­self how to do ollies in her cul-de-sac.

“I saw the skater kids being their own lit­tle group of mis­fits, and so I was like ​‘let me jump in and con­nect with these peo­ple because they feel like out­siders too so maybe I can be an out­sider with them,” she says. ​“But the thing is they were all dudes and I was a girl so I was still an out­sider in a group of outsiders.”

Two years lat­er, Wosin­s­ka bought her first cam­era, a com­pact Nikon F5, which soon became her win­dow to friend­ship groups and skate scenes. ​“I would walk into a new scene, and it was ter­ri­fy­ing to walk into a house par­ty or someone’s back­yard with a mini ramp, even though it seemed cool. But I’d always have my cam­era with me and it was like a kind of shield, an armour – it gives me rea­son to be here.”

Before she knew it, Wosin­s­ka moved from doc­u­ment­ing her friends at the local skatepark to pro-skaters on edi­to­r­i­al shoots across the USA, strik­ing up friend­ships and shoot­ing sport leg­ends like Chad Mus­ka, Erik Elling­ton, Austyn Gillette, Ed Tem­ple­ton and many more. Now, she reflects on her jour­ney, and digs out hun­dreds of pho­tographs from her archive and presents them in her new pho­to­book Ful­fill the Dream.

It’s a wide-rang­ing look at skate­board cul­ture from the late ​‘90s to the present day from a woman’s per­spec­tive. Through­out its pages, the pic­tures show­case the many sides of life as a skater – there’s care­ful­ly framed, pro­fes­sion­al shots from mag­a­zine shoots placed next to can­did shots of friends drink­ing, par­ty­ing and just gen­er­al­ly hang­ing out.

But on top of the ollies and kick­flips, the book goes deep into Wosinska’s per­son­al sto­ry. Weav­ing text through­out the pho­tographs, she reveals in gran­u­lar, occa­sion­al­ly dis­qui­et­ing detail the ups and downs she faced as a migrant, a teenag­er try­ing to find her place, and then a woman nav­i­gat­ing a male dom­i­nat­ed world.

Her sto­ry is one of rebel­lion and resilience. ​“I mean it was our ver­sion of [hit TV show] Eupho­ria,” she says of her younger years, with a laugh. ​“Just with­out cell phones – every­body did drugs, we went to raves, we robbed hous­es, we were drink­ing, we were shoplift­ing. It was fuck­ing gnarly, until I got caught rob­bing a house and then had to pick up trash on the side of the free­way in 110 degree weath­er because I was about to go to juvie, but in Ari­zona there wasn’t a lot going on so you made the most of what you could.”

Ulti­mate­ly, Ful­fill the Dream is Wosinska’s way of clos­ing a chap­ter. Now aged 40, she’s still find­ing new ways to express her­self. ​“The minute I stepped into Amer­i­ca it was like I need­ed to be seen and heard, and had to be strong,” she says. ​“And that’s an immi­gra­tion thing that prob­a­bly nat­u­ral­ly put me into a very male-dom­i­nat­ed world of skate­board­ing. I skat­ed from 12 to 20, then aged 20 to 30 played gui­tar in a met­al band, then 30 to 40 I was direct­ing com­mer­cials and shoot­ing motor­cy­cles for ad jobs – I was always choos­ing these male roles.

“And now I’m 40, I don’t fuck­ing give a fuck, I don’t want to improve myself any­more,” she con­tin­ues. ​“I just want to be a girl, so the book was like ​‘that was me as a boy’, now, let me be a woman for the first time in my life.”

Ful­fill the Dream by Magde­le­na Wosin­s­ka is pub­lished by Home­com­ing Gallery.

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