It’s 1980-something and I’m a skinny, buck-toothed, shy American teenager growing up in Asia. I was a nerdy reclusive kid, pretty much as far from being a cool, California-surfer type as anyone on the planet. But I could dream. I longed desperately to be a “normal” American kid–even though I had no idea what that really meant. But in my dreams, normal American kids had long flowing hair and rode skateboards on the boardwalks and in secret backyard pools in California.

Skateboarding had just exploded on the scene and all of us kids were trying our best to be as cool as what we saw in pictures. I lived and dreamed through magazines. In those days magazines were everything. They were our way of connecting with the outside world. It’s hard to believe now-in the age of electronic access to everything-but in those days we lived, learned and dreamed about the future through what we saw and read in magazines. But even magazines were hard to get where we were in the Philippines. The only way we could get them was to visit the military installation, Clark Air Force Base, and have someone buy them for us, and they were not cheap. But I begged, borrowed and cajoled my parents into buying them for me at every opportunity. I read the stories and looked at the photographs time and time again until the magazine either completely fell apart or one of my friends “borrowed” it.

Transworld Skateboarding was one of the most valuable magazines in my collection. Laying in my bed late at night hiding under the covers with my flashlight looking at the photos I dreamed of living in California and sidewalk surfing on the boardwalks of some neglected beach town. I pleaded with my parents to let me grow my hair longer and I bought Sun-In in the hope of achieving that blonde surfer look that I saw so often in the magazines. We would take our skateboards out and set up ramps and try as we could to emulate the photos that we saw in the magazine. It was a dream that I was determined to live and I still have the scars to prove it.

So many photographers through the years have affected how we each individually see the world, even if we never think about who those photographers actually are. J. Grant Brittain is one of those artists and photographers who definitely shaped my view of the world through his work. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue who J. Grant Brittain was until much later in life and yet I knew so many of his photographs by heart.