The empty pool, while an established terrain element in North American skating, remains a rare object in Japan. Very few concrete parks with pools or bowls were ever constructed and those that remain are infamous for their rough surfaces, treacherousness, and massiveness. Most notable is the Mikasa bowl in Hokkaido which persists as an apocryphal site both for its size and remote inaccessibility, occasionally appearing in major skate publications and videos as an object survived by only the most skilled, intrepid and blessed skaters.

Tokyo-based photographer and skater Hirano Taro has searched out many pools at abandoned hotels and vacant houses throughout the US, making images exhibited widely and published in two books. The first was aptly entitled Pools and the second, Foreclosure, a slim monograph published in 2008, takes on its title a more political facet of these derelict pieces of American luxury so desired by skaters. Each image is shot in full daylight, eschewing the romanticizing aura of dawn or sunset, as if to lay bare an emptiness already contained in the structures he photographs. Hirano compiles his photographs from his familiar territory of SoCal, Arizona and Nevada, presumably from areas where real estate markets failed spectacularly such as Orange County, Las Vegas and Phoenix. The buildings are hollowed out by financial collapse while the pools on these properties are dry and devoid of conventional pleasure or aesthetics. But in their emptiness they make way for new inscriptions and new purposes. Graffiti adorns a few walls and wheel marks left by skaters describe curving arches over the transitioned corners of some pools. In one photograph, a sun-baked pool area of a shuttered Best Budget Inn sprouts weeds in the cracks as tendrils of a resilient plant sprout from the filter intake as if from a subterranean window box, flora erupting from what skaters call the “deathbox.” If Los Angeles’ environmental drought of the late 70s caused a contraction in bourgeois pleasures as pools went un(ful)filled, then the “drought” of capital serves as the destructive operation in opening pools once again to transient pleasures and placing them outside the policed territories of valuable private property. The final image in Foreclosure frames the only human to appear: a teenaged boy climbing a tall white-washed fence, presumably to liberate an abandoned pool for an afternoon session. Hirano’s work contributes to the grand project Foucault imagines: “A whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be the history of powers…from the grand strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” (Foucault 1980, 252). See here for more.

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