Pictures of the Day: Egypt and Elsewhere

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Photos from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and South Africa.

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Skating Through Life

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The table is set for a Christmas feast. Candles adorn a white tablecloth on which white plates have been carefully placed. At one end is a box of clementines set down by Asbjørn Sand, who photographed the dramatically lighted scene â€" in the middle of a skateboard ramp.

The setting (Slide 13) makes perfect sense after a conversation with Mr. Sand, 25, a Danish photographer who has been skateboarding since he was 11. Soon after he got into it, he started taking pictures. The life he and his friends have chosen is not about daredevil thrills, but an enduring bond.

“To me, skateboarding is about friendships and love,” Mr. Sand said. “That’s where I feel at home. That’s where I feel I belong and can relax and hang out forever, without getting tired of it. I don’t have to talk all the time, just hang out.”

When he does talk about skateboarding, he exudes a certain happiness and warmth: feelings that suffuse his photographs, which offer an intimate look at a diverse band of friends. It would be wrong to say the skateboard is incidental â€" indeed, it unites them â€" but the pictures show deep, quiet moments within their world.

Through this, Mr. Sand has become close to people with little education and to others with graduate degrees. People with money and others who live day to day. Skaters barely in their teens and others approaching middle age.

Growing up in a small town in central Denmark, about 12 miles southwest of Odense, he got into skateboarding when he and some friends started playing the video game “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.” When his best friend, Rune Hansen, got a skateboard, Mr. Sand built one himself.

“I used a flat wooden deck that was wobbly and used roller-skating wheels with no bearings in them,” he said. “I hammered them into the sides, and that’s how I got started.”

Skateboarding soon consumed his attention. It became more than a sport, a way of life, for him and Rune. He also began to take pictures using a pocket camera that belonged to his father, an amateur photographer. He started out photographing trick moves, but then got into composition. That, in turn, prompted him to study photography at the Danish School of Media and Journalism (only after he and his family moved away from their small town).

Even as he studied in college, his skateboarding pictures were a continuing side project. In class, though, when he suggested skateboarding as a subject worthy of a project, he said his teachers discouraged him. Instead, he worked on portraits and other series, like one about people who live in the style of Vikings.

He returned to Odense for an internship, where he reconnected with his friends. He felt at home among them, even more so than among his family. In time, Mr. Sand wound up living in a garden shack that had no electricity or water in the winter. What it did have was a skateboarding bowl that he and his friends built.

Asbjørn Sand The construction of the skateboarding bowl Mr. Sand and his friends built in the backyard of a garden shack.

“We don’t have empty pools like in California, so we built one using our own money,” he said. “In a bowl made for skateboarding, it’s like dancing. How can I do something with my body to make it flow? It’s a different way to master your physics.”

For all the kinds of work he did, including a brief foray into freelancing, it is still his skateboarding photography that speaks to him most deeply. It was something he continued doing even when others were puzzled. Now, as he digs into his archives to find more images, others are starting to appreciate what he has done.

“The way it is now is totally different from everything I have done over the years,” he said. “I had never imagined what it would be like in the end. But I think I’m at the end of the first part of the project, though I’ll never stop photographing skateboarding.”

He learned from friends the importance of traveling light: he keeps his belongings at a friend’s house and lives out of a tent sometimes. Right now, he is off hitchhiking through Sweden and Finland. When he gets back, he might try to publish a book of his photographs. He might even freelance again, though he would prefer a job working in nature.

“I’d like to find some other way to make money and then be able to do the photographs I want to do,” he said. “I want to photograph things that are close to my heart. But maybe I don’t need to make a living off photography to keep on photographing.”

Asbjørn Sand From “Roll Whatever.”

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