“You have to take the U-turn,” Bill Yates says. He’s agreed to talk to me about his book, Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink, and share his philosophy on photographing. “You have to make it happen; you have to take the chance. If you drive by and miss the opportunity, you can never go back. “
More than forty years ago, Bill Yates made one of those U-turns, while out driving around in rural southern Florida, outside of Tampa. He pulled over by an old wooden building, with a sign reading “Sweetheart Roller Skating”. The owner advised him to come back that night, when the place would be “jumpin’.” That weekend, in September of 1972, he began photographing the scene at this roller rink in Hillsborough County, a project that lasted seven months and produced more than 700 negatives. He was just twenty-five years old, and he used the images to apply to graduate school. Then, as one does, he moved on to other projects, and the negatives and proofs of those nights at the rink were boxed up and stored away. But a few years ago, spurred on by a few different forces, the encouragement of his family being one of them, he unearthed those negatives and showed them to the world.
He says, “Be careful what you wish for.” Instead of a little recognition, the Sweetheart project has blown up – shows in museums and galleries, dozens of internet features, and it’s now being released in a new book from Fall Line Press. He describes the work as “a slice of time … of southern Florida before it became Disney-fied.” A time before cell phones, and when there wasn’t a camera in every pocket. For many of the people he encountered that first weekend, this was the first time they had been photographed apart from a school picture or a family snapshot. When he returned to the rink after his first visit, he hung the proof sheets up on the wall so the skaters could see them. At that point, he knew it was a great project.
More than forty years ago, Bill Yates made one of those U-turns, while out driving around in rural southern Florida, outside of Tampa. He pulled over by an old wooden building, with a sign reading “Sweetheart Roller Skating”. The owner advised him to come back that night, when the place would be “jumpin’.” That weekend, in September of 1972, he began photographing the scene at this roller rink in Hillsborough County, a project that lasted seven months and produced more than 700 negatives. He was just twenty-five years old, and he used the images to apply to graduate school. Then, as one does, he moved on to other projects, and the negatives and proofs of those nights at the rink were boxed up and stored away. But a few years ago, spurred on by a few different forces, the encouragement of his family being one of them, he unearthed those negatives and showed them to the world.
He says, “Be careful what you wish for.” Instead of a little recognition, the Sweetheart project has blown up – shows in museums and galleries, dozens of internet features, and it’s now being released in a new book from Fall Line Press. He describes the work as “a slice of time … of southern Florida before it became Disney-fied.” A time before cell phones, and when there wasn’t a camera in every pocket. For many of the people he encountered that first weekend, this was the first time they had been photographed apart from a school picture or a family snapshot. When he returned to the rink after his first visit, he hung the proof sheets up on the wall so the skaters could see them. At that point, he knew it was a great project.
When the work was first shown in New Orleans in 2015, Yates said, “people would come up to me, from Iowa, Wisconsin, California, wherever, and say they went to a roller skating rink, or an ice skating rink, just like that, when they were young.” For many, the rink was a place where their parents dumped them on the weekends, a place where they learned to grow up. A place they learned social skills – and a place to see and be seen. For the inhabitants of that rural county in southern Florida, the Sweetheart Skating Rink was, every Friday and Saturday night, their Studio 54. The great Studio 54 analogy comes from Barbara Griffin, the editor of the book.
And man, is it a gorgeous book. The black and white prints, reproduced using stochastic printing, are lush and perfect, startlingly so. They create holes in each page – windows through which the characters seem to reach out at you, or ones you could climb through into the fantastic world of the Sweetheart. The young skaters, bathed in the light of the flash, are made immortal. In the words of Richard McCabe, Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, who wrote the introduction, it’s “a visual time capsule” and “one of the definitive visual records of youth culture in the American South.”
When the work was first shown in New Orleans in 2015, Yates said, “people would come up to me, from Iowa, Wisconsin, California, wherever, and say they went to a roller skating rink, or an ice skating rink, just like that, when they were young.” For many, the rink was a place where their parents dumped them on the weekends, a place where they learned to grow up. A place they learned social skills – and a place to see and be seen. For the inhabitants of that rural county in southern Florida, the Sweetheart Skating Rink was, every Friday and Saturday night, their Studio 54. The great Studio 54 analogy comes from Barbara Griffin, the editor of the book.
And man, is it a gorgeous book. The black and white prints, reproduced using stochastic printing, are lush and perfect, startlingly so. They create holes in each page – windows through which the characters seem to reach out at you, or ones you could climb through into the fantastic world of the Sweetheart. The young skaters, bathed in the light of the flash, are made immortal. In the words of Richard McCabe, Curator of Photography at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, who wrote the introduction, it’s “a visual time capsule” and “one of the definitive visual records of youth culture in the American South.”
Everything is beautiful here – warm, sexy, and brilliant. Alexander Nemerov wrote the epilogue for the book, and he describes the scene perfectly, writing, “Light and skin make the atmosphere. The light is beautiful and soft–not the harsh light of journalism and exposé, but a delicate mixture of the camera’s flash and the darkness.” And that, “The soft light is a kind of skin. It seems there is no sensuous difference between the skin and the light that lets the skin be seen.” There is definitely a lot of skin on display here, but there’s something more, an energy, and exuberance, that really dominates the images. The subjects both perform explicitly for the camera and ignore it, and they are captivating in their contradictions – their sexuality and innocence, bravado and awkwardness.
The cover image shows two skaters on the floor, one who is sprawled out with his arm flung across his face, hair flying. It’s unclear whether he has fallen, or is in the middle of a spectacular move. In another image, a beautiful blond boy with a Floyd name patch on his shirt and a cigarette dangling from his mouth casually gives a light to the girl crouching next to him, while a little boy peers up at him with admiration. Groups of girls and boys put themselves on display – one group of boys, all shirtless, pose in the parking lot. Three of them stand stiffly, hands clasped in front of their bodies, while the fourth squats in front, grinning and pointing a pistol at his temple. Couples lounge, flirt, and embrace.
Nostalgia is defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. This collection of images is suffused in it, it pulls you down in it, but you come out the other side feeling invigorated, as impossibly young and vibrant as the skaters were in ’72 and ’73. It doesn’t matter what happened later – to them, or to us. Many of those kids are now in their 50s or 60s, some happy and content, some beaten down by life, some dead. I asked Bill if he has been contacted by any of the people in the photos, and he told me about Larry, a man who drove more than 4 hours from Alabama to New Orleans one evening to see the show. He had heard from some relatives in Tampa about the project, and they had recognized his younger self in a photo. He wanted to check it out to see if it was true. Bill ran into him outside of the museum, and invited him back later for the opening. That evening, onstage with Bill, Larry told his story – he had been living in Tampa, and his teenage wife had just been killed in an auto accident. A few days after her death, he went out, to be around people for a while, and Bill captured him in a crowd.
When I asked Bill about how he felt about these images being published, he said that the book would have never happened without his complete confidence in Fall Line Press and what he called “The Sweetheart Dream Team.” And it paid off – he considers the book as the visual embodiment of how these photos should be presented, and the benchmark for any future uses of the work. In telling me about the process of making the book, he praised everyone involved, but especially the editor, Barbara Griffin. “She read my mind and read my heart completely. The work is the work, but the edit really makes it.” She made sense out of more than 700 images – and taught Bill one thing about editing – the photographer is his own worst editor. When I spoke to Barbara about editing the book, she talked about her first time seeing the work, including an enormous scroll of a proof sheet that Bill carried around. She said, “Looking at the work was like being at an archaeological dig and finding an amazing artifact … discovering something right at the beginning.” It was incredible, she said. There were no definite “outs” in the images, and she marveled at what he had accomplished - to do something so candid, and so unexpected for the time. And the more she looked, the more nuances she found. When she began to edit the work, she asked for all of the images (more than 700) to work from. She was overwhelmed at first by the task. Bill was so passionate about the images, and she wanted to honor the work. But by the time she put her preliminary edit together, she believed in it and didn’t want to change a thing. Nevertheless, she says she was a nervous wreck when she showed him the first edit. His response was, “I always saw these as single images,” and she knew she had done well. When editing, she asks herself, what are the stories in these images? The editor can bring those moments to life, in the images selected and the way they are presented. She shared with me some of her favorites – one wonderful spread places a photo of two boys opposite one of two girls – both images showing a pair of kids filled with bravado – one of the girls is surreptitiously giving the photographer the finger – and she notes how much smaller the boys are than the girls, but how much swagger they have. Griffin has her own memories of that time, and she pointed out to me something I hadn’t even noticed - the presence of hairbrushes in the images. People held them in their hands, or stuffed them in their pockets, while skating, in order to be able to touch up their coifs after a spin around the rink.
According to Griffin, the book reflects the rhythms of the skating rink and the time. She elaborated, “It was a very free time … you could feel the energy, the excitement, and the raging hormones. The rink was a microcosm; the families, younger kids, the teenagers, and the challenge of how they fit together.” She sequenced the book with this in mind, following the rhythm of a typical night at the rink. Starting with the arrival of the families in the early evening, then building in pitch through the night to the end, when the teenagers ruled the place. It’s easy, looking through this book, to remember being that age and in that state of mind - when the world is yours, and everything is new and exciting.
There will be a book signing during PhotoNOLA in New Orleans, LA, on December 11, 2016, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art
To see the full scope of the project, please visit:
www.sweetheartrollerskatingrink.com
To buy the book:
http://www.falllinepress.com/sweetheart-roller-skating-rink/
Silver Gelatin Prints are available through Mary Stanley Studio
Contact: mary@marystanleystudio.com
All images ©Bill Yates 2016 all rights reserved