Jenny Sampson’s Skater Girls brings female skateboarders on the American West Coast into sustained photographic view. Published by Daylight Books in 2020, the book gathers portraits made across California, Oregon, and Washington, attending to skaters of different ages within a culture long identified primarily with men. Its premise is corrective but not abstract: visibility begins with the presence of particular people before the camera.

Sampson photographs on location using wet-plate collodion, a nineteenth-century process, with an 8 × 10 view camera and portable darkroom. The method is unusually deliberate for subjects associated with speed, improvisation, and continual motion. Rather than treating skateboarding chiefly as spectacle, she gives its participants the concentrated space of portraiture. The historical process produces a productive tension between contemporary skate culture and an image-making technique that requires preparation, proximity, and collaboration.

That approach also shifts the book’s emphasis from athletic performance to membership and self-possession. These skaters are presented not as exceptions passing through a male domain, but as longstanding participants in the culture—girls and women whose presence has too often been underrepresented. Contributions by skateboard scholars and advocates Becky Beal and Cindy Whitehead extend the project beyond the photographs, placing the portraits within broader questions of gender and skateboarding history.

At 96 pages, this hardcover is a focused photographic statement rather than a general survey of the sport. For collectors, its importance lies in the specificity of Sampson’s subject and process: a regional record of West Coast skateboarders, an inquiry into representation, and a contemporary use of tintype and collodion portraiture. Skater Girls rewards attention as both a photographic monograph and a document of who is permitted to occupy the frame—and, by extension, the history of a subculture.