Wires Crossed — Ed Templeton, Aperture 2023

Wires Crossed is Ed Templeton’s most intimate reckoning with the skateboarding subculture he both documented and embodied. Published by Aperture in 2023, the book is a visual memoir of Templeton’s two-decade career straddling the edge of athletic performance, punk aesthetics, and diaristic photography. The title, taken from a recurring motif in Templeton’s graphic language, signals disruption, connection, misfire — a fitting metaphor for the charged, nonlinear path of a skateboarder’s life.

Through photographs, personal commentary, and archival material, Templeton charts the tightrope between chaos and grace, public image and private breakdown, youth as performance and youth as violence. We see grainy motel rooms, scraped skin, wired jaws, raw encounters with sex, substance, boredom, and joy. It's a lived anthropology, filtered through the eyes of someone both in the frame and behind the camera — always watching, always exposed.

This is not just a skate book. It’s a fractured bildungsroman that echoes the raw vulnerability of Larry Clark, the suburban hauntings of Jim Goldberg, and the immersive candour of Nan Goldin. Designed by Templeton himself with a linocut-like cloth cover, the object feels both urgent and carefully crafted — a tactile homage to the hand-made, the fucked-up, the real.

Title: Wires Crossed
Artist / Author: Ed Templeton
Date: 2023
Technique / Printing Method: Offset printing
Medium / Materials: Clothbound hardcover
Dimensions (cm): approx. 24 x 32 cm
Language (books): English
Publisher / Editor (books): Aperture
ISBN: 978-1-59711-536-0
Condition: NEW