Capsule: Helge Tscharn

In 1981 Helge Tscharn began to photographically document the dawn of German skateboarding history. His photos, spanning over 40 years, exude the sweat and blood of the riders in every grain and appear like time capsules with an unmistakable feel for the moment. Text in English and German.

In 1981--just three years after skateboards first arrived in Germany from the USA--Helge Tscharn began to photographically document the dawn of German skateboarding history. Being part of the scene himself, Tscharn captured every phase of German skateboarding with his signature style: the raw beginnings of the 1980s, heavily influenced by the punk rock movement, were immortalized in grainy black-and-white shots, while color film and the occasional fisheye lens came into use in the era of hip-hop and 90s streetwear. Over the course of his career, he not only witnessed talent come and go, but also the rise of the stars of the skateboarding world--and often their tragic downfall.

Tscharn was always there, always in the thick of it, accompanying the indie and emo wave of the 2000s, the DIY culture of the 2010s, and of course, the present, which embraces and reinterprets all these influences. His photos, spanning over 40 years, exude the sweat and blood of the riders in every grain and appear like time capsules with an unmistakable feel for the moment.

With portraits of: Lance Mountain, Jim Greco, Sonic Youth, Pantera, Motorhead, Marc Gonzales, Tom Penny, Prodigy, Aphex Twin and others.

Helge Tscharn has been documenting the German-European skateboard scene since the early eighties. The subjects could not be more different. Here the skateboarders and their world, there musicians, not on stage, but mostly before and after their performances. Speed and dynamism here, calm or tension there. For Helge Tscharn, this is not a contradiction, he is a skateboard and music photographer. While he has been documenting the German-European skateboard scene since the early eighties and thus showing even the uninitiated why these boards of all things mean the world, he also increasingly turned to music photography in the nineties: superficially pure portraits, they convey at second glance that pop music is a 24-hour event for everyone directly involved.