finding purpose

Photography by Ramon Follente

Barcelona, Spain

Coming from the small town of Pontevedra, in Galicia, Spain, photographer Ramon Follente started skateboarding at the age of 16, a late-bloomer by most standards. “Being from a small town, we didn't have that much of a reference of what skateboarding was,” Ramon explains, “and most kids started around that age, when we got bored of football (soccer). In the beginning, there were just a handful of kids our age that skated in 2008 and it wasn't a big deal like it is now. In something like a year or two, we became a really big group of kids skating around a small city with no park to go and with a lot of old people angry about what we were up to.” The government started to get involved and it became a big ordeal, making a lot of people quit skateboarding, including Ramon.

After a period of not skating, Ramon understood how much the sport meant to him. “When I came back to skateboarding it made me realize that for me it's like a mental break, something that makes me able to go throw a crappy week or day and take me back to a nice mood were I don't want to kill someone around me, it just gives you this personal feeling of freedom that you cant match with anything, you don't have no one telling you how to this or that you just go and do what you want.”

Ramon has recently moved to Barcelona, Spain, a move that opened up his world. “Coming from all this years in a small town with almost nowhere to skate, Barcelona is like a theme park,” Ramon says about his new home. “A lot of new spots and parks to photograph. You can take a notebook or your phone to make notes on light conditions and cool locations to photograph.”

Ramon’s love of skateboarding inspired him to pick up a camera. “I always liked photography,” he says, revealing the story of how he became a photographer. “Getting into skateboarding, skate magazines, videos, and all of the fashion that comes with it made me develop a personal taste and I got an urge to capture these moments. Now, I try to create a photo that matters, something you can spend some time seeing, that makes you say ‘Ok, this guy doing this must be good.’ Even if the viewer isn't into skateboarding, they can look at photographs and appreciate both the trick and the image itself.”

Just like skateboarding, photography changed Ramon’s life for the better. “Besides skateboarding, photography is the thing that gives me a lifelong purpose,” he expresses, “I’v always had trouble focusing on something that I saw myself doing long term but now I know I will be really happy dedicating my life to photography. I think it made me a better person overall, it opened me to a lot of new people and awesome stuff that I will never have experienced and that have changed me to the person I am now.”