As a teenager, Fred Mortagne shot his friends skateboarding through the historic city centre of his home Lyon. He grew to film and photograph some of skateboarding’s most iconic characters. Bit by bit, Mortagne began to blend still photography into his film. “I became used to visualising angles that would be good for photography, but didn’t necessarily work for video”, employing a 24-90mm lens with a high ISO so he can get a better grain within his images he has become known for picturing from angles no one else sees. Mortagne got one of his earliest shots of a skateboarder coursing through a hotels carpark while leaning off a balcony of a hotel room on the 17th floor.
Nearly 25 years since Mortagne started filming skaters he released his first photobook titled “Attraper Au Vol” (Catch in the Air) and features images of skaters on locations all over the world. “With skateboarding, you travel a lot trying to find new spots, we skate around modern buildings which often also happen to be very photogenic”. Mortagne explains that when you film skateboarders it is very close up so you lose the dimension of where the skateboarders fully are, and he wanted to recapture that dimension within his photography.
“Attraper Au Vol”
Attraper au vol (Catch in the Air) is the culmination of Mortagne’s photographic career, from 2000 to 2015. A feast of lines and angles, his black-and-white compositions blend his subjects into their environments, offering an abstract perspective on architecture, geometry and the human figure. “Well, it’s my first major book. We didn’t even really have to talk about it but it was obvious we would just go dig through my whole photo library. So I dug out a lot of things. Obviously all the famous stuff. And then actually there’s also a lot of new material that I shot that makes up almost half the book too.”