HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Photographer Alexis Jade Gross keeps it real and takes the homies with he

"What the fuck? These photos are like something that I already take, pictures of stuff that I am already doing with my friends. I could just be taking photos of my friends.”

Photographer Alexis Jade Gross describes her experience flipping through the photo book of photographer [REDACTED] when she realized hey, she could do that too! Gross has since made a name for herself documenting the scenes intersecting between music and skateboard culture, building relationships with bands like Turnstile by taking deeply authentic, visually arresting images.

She became interested in photography because her mom used to shoot for a local newspaper in her native Long Island. She began shooting her friends in the skateboarding scene, eventually making her way to Los Angeles, what she describes as the “hub” of skateboarding. She was working at a skateboarder-owned pizza shop when Vans tapped her and “offered an insane amount of money to just shoot photos of my friends in their shoes.” She left the job and didn’t look back.

“My boss was like, ‘You’re gonna run through that money real quick,”’ she recalls. “‘You’ll be back.’ And I think when people challenge me like that, I’m always like, ‘I’ll never see you again.”’

She still counts that boss amongst her friends, but she never did go back to working at the pizza shop. There’s something to be said for the freedom of not really giving a shit—doing it ad hoc and as it comes naturally to you. When you don’t force it, the universe seems to naturally open up to you. That’s how it went for Gross—these photos of her skateboarding friends made their way around, bands began to see them, they began hitting her up to take their photos. And now nearly 50 percent of her clientele are musicians.

And by ad hoc, I mean to say that Gross has no formal training. She is a trained hairstylist who never got her license, forging her own path to her career as a photographer. The camera she uses is a secret, but she does shoot on film, describing the process thusly: “It’s like when you were a kid and you did anything you could to get the photos off your disposable camera and onto your computer. Basically, [it’s] a version of that.”

“I have friends who went to [photography] school, and they treat their negatives like they’re fucking gold. And then they see me do my work and they’re like, ‘What?’ [And I’m like,] ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

So far, not worrying about it has worked out just fine for Gross.

MANDY BROWNHOLTZ