Warren Bolster, a leading surfing photographer whose detour into skateboarding journalism helped popularize and define the wheeled sport during its explosive rebirth in the 1970s, has died. He was 59.
Bolster, who had battled chronic pain and addiction to a painkiller, died Sept. 6 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Mokuleia, Hawaii, said his attorney, Teresa Tico.
As a photographer, he was known for putting himself dangerously close to the action, often colliding with his subjects or their speeding platforms. He had endured at least a dozen surgeries and many broken bones participating in and documenting the activities.
"I almost destroyed myself to give a larger life to the sport," he wrote in "The Legacy of Warren Bolster: Master of Skateboard Photography," a 2004 book that features more than 100 of his photographs, often taken at jarringly odd angles.
Nine days before his death, Bolster was injured when his car was rear-ended in a serious collision that "was the breaking point," Tico said. "He could not cope with another day of pain."
Stacy Peralta, a filmmaker who featured Bolster's work in "Riding Giants" (2004) and "Dogtown and Z-Boys" (2001), compared the photographer's "psychic sensibility" to that of an artist, "but he was in a world that didn't necessarily embrace a person like that."
As the editor who resurrected SkateBoarder magazine in 1975, Bolster was like a "disc jockey feeding kids a new signal about the sport," said Peralta, who was a champion skateboarder when he met Bolster in the 1970s. "He had a lot to do with shaping the vision of what skateboarding was at that time all over the world."
Photographically, Bolster remained on the cutting edge for his entire career. He was among the first to use fish-eye lenses, motor-drive sequences and strobes while documenting California's skateboarding culture.
After leaving SkateBoarder in 1978, he moved to Hawaii and developed a reputation as an innovative and competitive surfing photographer who was always searching for a dramatic angle.
In the 1980s, Bolster rode in a helicopter off Oahu's North Shore to shoot Alec Cook riding one of the biggest waves that had been photographed up to that time, said Jeff Divine, a photo editor at Surfing Journal who had worked with Bolster.
More recently, Bolster had captured a striking inside-the-wave surfing perspective by mounting a waterproof camera on a surfboard -- and convincing surfers to ride with the contraption. He snapped pictures by remote while standing on the beach.
