Inside New York City’s hedonistic 2000s skateboarding scene

In 2004, photographer Patrick O’Dell sat down with his friend Amy Kellner, who was working as an editor at a nascent skate magazine named Vice. The pair had collaborated in the past through their editorial work – via high-res film shots, shot to be printed on glossy pages – but O’Dell wanted to do something different.

“I bought a digital point and shoot, because I was looking at Amy’s blog called Teenage Unicorn,” he recalls. “I was like: ‘Show me what I got to do to make one of these.’ She told me to buy a Canon ELPH, which was like $200 at the time, and download these apps and then [how to] make a blog.”

Gathered round a silver plastic, boxy desktop monitor, the pair sat, cracked jokes and smoked cigarettes as they uploaded low-res shots one-by-one at a glacial pace, navigating the likes of Yahoo PageBuilder in the process. After some hours, the very first post on the Epicly Later’d blog was live. While O’Dell continued to take professional photographs for work, between 2004 and 2012 he uploaded digital shots made with his compact camera at parties, skateparks and generally anywhere he went on a daily basis.

“With film, all my photography just sat in a box, and you could be like ‘oh, I have all these great pictures, but unless a magazine printed them or you made a photobook, it was pretty tough and there was a barrier to entry,” he says. “So I started the blog.”

Now, two decades since his first post, O’Dell has drawn hundreds of the best pictures from his internet archive and collated them into a new photobook, Epicly Later’d. What results is a lucid survey of New York City’s skate scene and its hedonistic culture in the mid-to-late 2000s, via awkward poses, digital redeye, and indie sleaze era binge drinking. With baby-faced appearances from the likes of Jerry Hsu, Chloe Sevigny, Jason Dill, Tino Razo and more pros making appearances, the pictures make for an intimate, behind the scenes look at the lives and characters of the city’s skate community filled with fun-seeking young adults.

Captured with early-stage, inexpensive digital technology, the pictures are very much of the era that they were taken. “I would put pictures up every day – I would go out and try to tell a little story, like: ‘We got in a taxi, we went to Max Fish, then we went to Sway, then we got in another taxi and then I went home and went to sleep,” he explains. “I was lucky because there was a lot of New York stuff, like bars and clubs, and then I’d go on a skate tour.”

Often removed from their skateboards and away from the skateparks, it’s a wider vision of the scene, the lifestyles its characters led and the subculture as a whole. “Sometimes when we were shooting skate photos, we’d be trying to shoot a really hard trick and I would get a little bored,” he says. “I always liked the adventure of pro skating more, and the stories of skating more than any individual trick.”

Soon after publishing his first post, O’Dell quickly discovered the different pace and possibilities of digital publishing. At its peak, the blog was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people – at one point an unfathomable number. “Right in the first week, it was like 1,500 views,” he says. “I was like: ‘Wow, 1,500 people looked at this, that is insane.’ Back then, you’d take a good photo and if you’re lucky you could show it to 30 people or something, or you make a zine and you make 100 copies – it was like I printed a zine with 1,500 copies.”

The book also provides a nostalgic look at a different era of the internet. Roughly half a decade before mass social media platforms came to dominate screen times, it harks back to a less curated, more DIY cyberspace as the world learned how to interact and present themselves online. “A lot of it is cringey or hasn’t aged well, or is just stupid,” he says. “We grew up – I always had stunted development a little bit, but these photos feel like delayed high school. I was in my 20s, but I look at it as like being a kid.”

Epicly Later’d by Patrick O’Dell is published by Mexican Summer & Anthology

Epicly Later’d by Patrick O’Dell is published by Anthology Editions

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