I first came to know of Ed Templeton sometime around 1990, when he began appearing in national skateboarding magazines as an up and coming young pro. Like Templeton, I was a teenager who had immersed myself in skateboarding and photography as means of self-expression, discovery, and escape from the trials of suburban American adolescence. Much like photography, skateboarding thrives on its ability to use the detritus of the modern world as raw material for individual expression. For many of us, skateboarding was not an activity separate from the rest of life, but rather a kind of athletic manifestation of a particular worldview in which individuality, creativity and freedom from prescribed limits were top priorities. Templeton works very much within this vein in Deformer, presenting a seamlessly integrated view of his photography and his life.

Set up in scrapbook style, Deformer combines Templeton's photographic work from the past decade with pages from his sketchbook journal and artifacts from his childhood—snapshots, letters, report cards, written memories. Divided into two sections, the book first sketches out the details of Templeton's less than ideal childhood, then dives into his encounters with the larger world. Themes of damaged lives, the loss of innocence and the failure of institutional authority run through both sections. Letters from Templeton's grandparents offer a glimpse of a moral compass, but the photographs, which show a darker and more complex reality, undermine their clear-cut views on religious and patriotic virtue. Sex, children with adult vices, the homeless and handicapped abound, often juxtaposed with images of crosses or American flags.

The photographs have a rough, casual aesthetic and make no claims of containing the world within their frames. Working outside of the "decisive moment" tradition of street or documentary photography, which strives towards distillation and self-containment, Templeton makes photographs that are, much like the letters and snapshots in the book, fragments which acquire their meaning only in the context of his life experiences. In looking at the world, he is really examining himself. A disturbing sequence showing two children making out reflects back on pictures of Templeton's long time partner, Deanna, after their first sexual encounter as teens, the sweetness of latter countered by the depravity of the former. Deanna's presence throughout Deformer often brings a warmth and light otherwise all but missing from the book. However, even this is complicated by vestiges of a dark past in the form of her teenage suicide letter. Deformer reveals a world where everyone has been wounded, where our shadows are long and fixed in place. —Aaron Rothman