Deanna Templeton

Deanna Templeton (1969, Huntington Beach) is an American artist and photographer. Templeton started pursuing photography at the age of 15 after her mum gifted her a camera. Soon, she started using that camera to explore and document the local LA punk scene.

Early in her photography career, Templeton traveled with her husband (Ed Templeton) and other professional skateboarders on their international tours. There she would document the scene. Accordingly, Templeton’s photographs from that period embody a unique perspective of the skateboard culture. Besides, they reflect a female perspective of a sport largely dominated by men. In 2007, she published the book Your Logo Here; the photographs capture young girls offering their bodies to their skateboard idols for them to sign and for skate companies to “brand” with spray paint templates. Photographs from Your Logo Here culminated in an exhibition titled Scratch My Name On Your Arm, which traveled throughout Europe in 2009; drawing inspiration from the punk scene that inspired her as a teenager, Templeton appropriated her exhibition’s title from a Smith’s song.

Then, she continued to explore the body with her 2016 book Swimming Pool, in which she photographed her friends who were invited to skinny dip in her pool; she documented these scenes over eight years in both colour and black-and-white photographs.

For around 20 years, Templeton made street portraits of young women that she collected in the book What She Said (2021). The portraits are contrasted with journal entries from her own adolescence in the 1980s.