Johnny Layton Week: Acosta's Angles

At Vans we’re lucky to have two of the best in the business in filmer Greg Hunt and photographer Anthony Acosta helping us show you all the great skating our guys are doing for this upcoming Vans video. For the 4th day of Johnny Layton Week we dug through Anthony Acosta's archives for some of his classic shots of JLAY from over the years.


We were at Woodward for a week Johnny and Andrew Allen came. We had this photo/video class that me and Greg Hunt were helping with. One of the nights was set up a shoot with Johnny Layton, Andrew Allen and Keegan Sauder. The kids all had their camera and thier flashes synched to the main instructors flash and they were taking turns shooting. It’s rad that Johnny knows how to step it up in demo situations and times like these. Johnny was just going higher and higher each time for the kids to practice taking shots. Then he took his shirt off…



This is a barn at my friend’s house in Chino on a dairy and that’s where the hay bales were stored and they turned it into a little skatepark. This is right by the prison, it’s kind of gnarly. You can hear sirens sometimes when riots and shit go down. But it’s cool. There’s cows everywhere and you can shoot shotguns and stuff.
So we did a Vans shoot there and this was one of the photos; Johnny going huge on a stalefish on the quarterpipe. I always thought it was a rad photo because he’s going pretty high.




This is in the hood in LA, off of Olympic. I guess it would be considered East LA. It was right in front of a bar. We’d always walk into the bar and the bartender lady would be super-bummed because we wanted to skate. That morning we went early and the lady said, “The owner just left, so you have 20 minutes to skate.” It was pretty sick. She shut the bar door for us and Johnny got this gap to crooks real quick. She was usually pretty lame because the owner was always there but once that dude left she let us skate. It would have been sick if we went in there afterwards and got a drink or something but it was 11am and no one was down.



This thing is pretty gnarly. We went there with that filmer kid, Don, who had that video called Ta-Ha. It’s rad he always has these cutty spots where Vans is located, Cypress, the worst place ever. It’s like the Orlando of the West Coast. But he always has little things to skate. This is right behind a hospital and it was open and we barged it and we got it in five minutes and left. Johnny has such a massive ollie that he can ollie anything and I love taking ollie photos of him. It’s a basic trick but it’s my favorite trick and he can do them over anything.



Look at the sides of that rail. Let’s talk about how that rail began. See how it’s bolted to the rail right there? I guess it use to be super-tall but Steve Berra somehow unbolted it and cut it down to size and then remounted it and he had the first photo on it; a nosegrind photo in a Transworld interview. It’s funny though; I don’t think the footage ever came out. What would you call that? Do it yourself-style? Or cheating? Or Hollywood set design? I thought it was pretty sick though. After Berra everyone smashed it. Johnny smith grinded it first try that day. I’m sure he could have done it at its original height. It would be awesome if Johnny took it back off, raised the bar back up to normal height, smith grinded it first try and then put it back down to Berra height. First try on this thing for Johnny was seriously nothing.



I had this idea of playing with shadows of a flatground trick with the shadow on the wall. This tunnel is in downtown LA and I told Johnny about the idea because he has gnarly flatground like he can pretty much pop anything waist high. He was down and he met me a Sunday evening around 7pm. Probably should have waited until midnight but I think he had a Clippers or Lakers game going. So I had my brother and cousin helping me as assistants because there was a bunch of cars going in and out. My cousin was watching for cars behind me because I wasn’t able to look back behind me and my brother was the guy holding he flash to the right. We’d set up and I’d have to focus which was pretty hard because it was pretty dark and he’d try his flatground trick and then cars would come by and I’d have to readjust. He did a frontside pop shove and there’s a bum in the middle you can see. He was sitting there and he drank a six-pack in five minutes watching us. He was stoked.


This just shows how much Johnny loves basketball; he brought the basketball to the skate session with Ave and Dill. It turned into a dunk contest with Dill. Johnny won; I think he had more hops. That photo from Day 2 of Johnny Week of him dunking was from that day. I shot that with his phone and he never gave me photo credit. Pretty weak. Ha.


This is Johnny Layton attire. He just runs the most randomest outfits. So funny. Pretty random. More random than Dan Lu. I think Dan Lu can pull it, Johnny just doesn’t care. Imagine pulling up to a spot and seeing this skate by? Haha.





This was the weekend of the opening of the House of Vans in Brooklyn. It was sick. Vans flew us all out there and we skated NYC for a couple days, got an article out of it, went and had some beers at the House of Vans and saw Mos Def play live. Rad couple days. This picture of Rowley and Johnny I used for the opener of the article is funny because I was rolling backwards, shooting fisheye and hit a rock and I fell backwards because I wasn’t looking. But no one is supposed to know that kind of stuff.



This was shot a long time ago in Orange County, California. Get this! The session was: Johnny, Griffin Collins, Grant Hatfield, Joe Krolick and Daewon Song. How random is that? But everyone was just skating I think I got photos of almost everyone. Grant had a sick back disaster that was used, this Johnny photo was an ad and Daewon had a backsmith on it that was used. All shot from the same angle. This thing used to have a little tranny poured up to it but they took it out and people do harder tricks on it, bank to ledge-style.



I rented this super expensive Tilt Shift lens and I had it for two weeks. It’s an architect lens, they use to shift lines and focal points. It’s a wide angle lens but all the lines are straight and even. Normally if you had a wide angle lens everything would be all distorted and weird looking. What it does is straighten out the lines and you can see my focus is straight up and down. You can see how the buildings on the left and right are out of focus but the center is in focus. Instead of focusing by distance you can focus by plains.
I tried to shoot a photo every day and it just would not work. This is the last day before I had to send it back and I was kind of bummed since I spent a couple hundred bucks to rent it. We went to this spot after getting kicked out of everywhere. This is downtown right next to USC. Johnny was frontside flipping it and I had my other lens out and I was like, “I’ll give it one last try with the Tilt Shift.” And it actually worked out perfect and it was the only photo that I got with that lens and it was one of the raddest photos I shot in a long time.