21/02/2017 

Max Fish bar was located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, a bar that Tino Razo had worked at for 12 years. In 2010, the owners of Max Fish decided to shut it's doors, rumoured to be because of a rent hike for the building. Without any plans for a job, Tino was offered something in Los Angeles, which lead to his decision for leaving New York. The move provided a change of scenery and the accessibility to the abundance of empty swimming pools in LA; the excitement of discovering and skating the pools with friends was something Tino wanted to document. Party in the Back is the manifestation of these experiences on film, published by Anthology Editions and Boo-Hooray. 

We sat down and had a quick conversation with Tino over the phone about the process of making the book and the type of music he was listening to when editing the book [click through photos].

Party in the Back will be available in-store and online from the 24th of February.

 

What have you been up to lately?

Working on all the background noise with that stuff [Party in the Back]. Getting products done and getting the show ready and stuff like that, as well as getting ready for the new season for work. Just a lot of things back to back

Your new book Party in the Back, is published by Anthology Editions and Boo-Hooray, can you please tell us about them?

Boo-Hooray is who got me in there and moving on the project. But that's owned by Johan Kugelberg, who's a photo editor and archivist. He was hired by Anthology Editions to curate their projects that they're doing through this new publication. All the books coming out through them, it's all Johan's stuff.

Johan Kugelberg has done some rad photography books. How did you guys link up?

Through friends of friends. My friends knew I was working on a book, my friend Gabe and Matt Sweeney...my two brothers, it was just kind of through word of mouth through family and stuff like that. 

I was in town in New York one time and I happened to have a PDF of it on my phone and showed it to him. Thank God he was into it. It was pretty easy, he said "Yeah, it looks like we got a book. We gotta change some things up, but let's do it." It was kind of a hand shake deal where it was like "We're doing it".

Was there a lot of back and forth with the editing process?

It was so easy. We went back and forth through edits for about a month, because I shot like 7000 something-odd photos. We worked between Johan, Brian and Bobby, that work at Boo-Hooray, and between all of us we kept going back and forth until we got to a compromise. 

Did you have an idea for the layout or sequence of the book or did it happen naturally?

It happened naturally and as it was happening somebody showed me a Japanese photographer's book on pools. So basically it was "don't make that book". It's a really beautiful book, just shot with, I believe, really nice cameras and maybe tripods and things like that. My project is just on the fly and just going through it; just show as much of everything as I could.

Did you skate all the pools you took photos of?

Every pool that I took a photo of from the backyard, I did skate. But for the ones that were over a fence and couldn't get to, I didn't. 

Are you working on anything at the moment?

Yeah, I'm loosely working on another project based around city nature. It's not really skate bowls. But I've never really shot photos or worked on a project or anything and as soon as I finished the book, I just wanted to keep moving.

I just realised that stuff is just something I've always noticed and amuses me somehow. So I'm just trying to shoot as much of that stuff to capture the humour, as well as how we're so shitty to nature in cities and how nature comes back at cities. 

 

 

All tracks selected by Tino Razo

Questions by Anthony Kwang

All images from PARTY IN THE BACK, Published by ANTHOLOGY EDITIONS.