Wayward Cognitions

Wayward Cognitions collects two decades of Ed Templeton's photographs of Orange County, California, an unsentimental record of skate culture, suburban sprawl and adolescence made by an artist who came up inside the world he photographs.

The 160-page monograph brings together Templeton's black-and-white and color images of teenagers, storefronts, parking lots and the built edges of Southern California, continuing the diaristic street photography that has run through his work since the early 1990s. It was published in 2014 by Um Yeah Arts with a text by Stijn Huijts.

Templeton, a former professional skateboarder and founder of the skate brand Toy Machine, has photographed skate and youth culture since the early 1990s, publishing widely and exhibiting internationally. His photography moves between snapshot immediacy and formal composition, treating the terrain skateboarding was built on as a lens on American adolescence more broadly.