Bio
| Mike Blabac is one of the preeminent skateboard photographers of his generation. He was born in 1973 inSteubenville, Ohio, and spent his youth in Lansing, Michigan. He first started skating when he was 12, inspired by the photos he saw in skateboarding magazines such as Thrasher and TransWorld SKATEboarding. He had always been interested in photography and spent hours studying the work by legendary skateboarding photographers Luke Ogden, J. Grant Brittain, and Spike Jonze. The young Blabac got his first camera, a used Nikon F3, at a swap meet in 1987. He started shooting pictures of his friends skateboarding around town and other kids at various skate events. Blabac continued to learn more about photography by working at a camera store as a teenager and assisting local photographerswith printing and on shoots. At age 20, after attending a photography class for just five days at a community college, he moved to San Francisco, the heart of the skate scene during the early to mid-’90s, to hone his craft in the streets instead of the classroom. In 1994, Brittain, an editor at TransWorld at the time, gave Blabac his first big break, publishinga full-page photo he shot of Edward DeVera in the magazine. Blabac started working for the skateboarding company Madcircle that same year, and soon after he saw many of his images on the pages of the same magazines he’d looked at as a kid. He later moved to Southern California, where he worked as a photographer for Girl Skateboard Company and Chocolate Skateboards.In 1999, Blabac joined DC Shoes, Inc., where he still works todayas director of skateboarding photography, a job that has taken himaround globe and allowed him to shoot some of the greatest skaterstoday, including Danny Way, Rob Dyrdek, and Josh Kalis. Hisskateboarding images have appeared in numerous publications—including Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, and virtuallyevery skateboard magazine—and on sites around the world, fromwebsites and billboards to sports-drink bottles. |
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