PROFILE OF ED AND DEANNA TEMPLETON FOR BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In 2022, I visited the artists Ed and Deanna Templeton at their Huntington Beach, California, home for a studio visit published in the British Journal of Photography. Ed and Deanna are both as kind and interested in others as they are prolific in their work and devoted to supporting each other’s practice. The visit was an inspiration. Published version here. Below, my “writer’s cut.”

By Kristina Feliciano

Vegan, monogamous, and a couple since they were teenagers, the artists Deanna and Ed Templeton live in an immaculate suburban neighbourhood in Huntington Beach, California. Located about 35 miles outside Los Angeles, HB, as the locals call it, is famous for its surf and skate culture. Visit the local mall, and you can pose on a stationary surfboard set against a massive oceanic mural. It’s also notorious for its preponderance of Trump supporters and mask-mandate protesters. A liberal artistic enclave it is not.  

Nevertheless, this is the city where the Templetons—two artists who are collectively known for their gritty photography, portraits, and paintings—grew up and have spent all their lives. However, though HB is a formative place for Deanna and Ed, it doesn’t define them. The pair met when he was 15 years old and she 18 and married four years later. Ed was a teenage skateboard star, and the couple traveled the world for his competitions. In 1994, he started to document skate life, establishing an immersive, dynamic aesthetic inspired in part by his love of the late Larry Clark’s work. 

Deanna, who had experimented with photography as a teenager, soon joined him in making photos. Armed first with a point & shoot, a gift from her mother, and then a Canon AE-1 that Ed gave her to encourage her, Deanna began to develop her own practice — though she is at pains to call it that. “I just started shooting,” she says, nearly whispering. Whereas Ed says he’s “more cynical,” an omnivorous street photographer who is “humanist/absurdist,” Deanna tends to direct her images. Like Ed, she’ll shoot two guys brawling on the street, “but then I’ll run up and ask the guy with the swastika on his chest, “Can I make your portrait?”

On this spotless sunny day, photographer Emily Monforte and I pull up to their modest two-story home on a street so quiet that it feels abandoned. A tall man with kind eyes comes out to greet us. This is Ed: painter, photographer, and 2016 inductee into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. He’s wearing Vans, a plaid button-down shirt, and perhaps a few days’ worth of stubble. He has the quiet but probing presence of the actor Joaquin Phoenix at his most empathic (think Mike Mills’ recent film C’mon C’mon). He invites us inside.    

Upon entering the home where they have lived since 2001, we encounter all the elements of classic American suburbia: comfortable furniture, tasteful decor, an abiding sense of order. It takes a moment to realize that it’s not all soothing aesthetic predictability: Hundreds of art books are arranged in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the walls are filled with artwork (their own and that of others), and there’s a project in the works at nearly every turn. 

Deanna, small, slender, smiling, and soft-spoken, joins us at the dining room table, where there’s a maquette for a potential group show at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco that will include her work. She has arranged carefully cut-to-size printouts of photographs, many of them from her book What She Said (Mack, 2021), on the scaled-down museum walls. In the living room, a small table holds paints and paper for the graphics Ed creates for his skateboard company, Toy Machine. He can work comfortably while he watches TV, or he can gaze out at the pool, where the couple have placed large inflatables—a razor-toothed shark and a dinosaur—to deter the ducks that occasionally fly overhead from hanging out.

Ed, 49, and Deanna, 52, have separate offices in the house. The garage, entered through the living room, has been converted into a painting studio for Ed. Spending more time in front of an easel, he has recently published a book of “multi-layered pen and ink scribbles” titled 87 Drawings, with Nazraeli Press. Artworks from his recent show at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles are being temporarily stored in a guest room downstairs. Both artists apologize for their presence, as if a few canvases leaning against a wall were a disruption to their guests. 

The couple are warm, generous, and attentive, to others and each other. When one of them speaks, the other watches and listens intently. They finish each other’s sentences not out of impatience but because they are deeply supportive of each other—each wants the other to feel and be understood. At one point, Deanna gently interrupts Ed to make a point, and she places her hand on his shoulder. He clasps his hand over hers, and they remain in this gesture of affection long after the topic has changed. 

“W​e’re creatures of habit,” says Ed, taking us through a typical day “chez Templeton.” They wake up around 10am, and he checks social media on his phone—a “slight doom scroll”—while she makes the smoothies they drink every morning. Then they go to their respective work spaces in the house until 2pm, when it’s time for tea. Deanna will make a soy chai or matcha, and the couple will sit out by the pool and catch each other up on their day. Then it’s back to work till 6pm. Deanna makes them both a juice, and they cook dinner together. This is followed by a walk around the neighborhood, maybe 40 minutes to an hour, “every single day,” says Ed. Evenings are for watching a movie. The Templetons have recently been working their way through films from Hollywood’s pre-Code era, though they also enjoy watching hockey.

“We are in the house together all day, and yet he has his office and I have my office,” says Deana. “I’ll be downstairs working out, and he’ll be upstairs or in the studio. So even our afternoon breaks for tea—it’s kind of like our little catch-up.”

For as long as they’ve been together, Ed has been documenting their relationship — including, in the early years, moments of sexual intimacy. They’d eventually like to publish the images in a book that Ed, whose initial influences include Nan Goldin, playfully calls Suburban Domestic Monogamy. “I look forward to it,” says Deanna, “because I think it’s going to be beautiful, just to look at our love. No one else might care to see it, but I’m happy he documented it.”

The pandemic has got the pair thinking about an alternative future, one outside of the comfort zone of Huntington Beach. “It’s so impractical. We have this whole thing here,” referring to their life in HB. “It’s way easier to continue the inertia of the path we’re on and not make this big change.”

For Deanna, there’s something about seeing themselves described as lifelong Huntington Beach residents that feels lacking. “I just want to have on our record that we had this other experience,” she says. “It would just be so sad if this was it.”

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