The art of skateboarding is an endearingly brutal one. The cyclicality of failure inherent to the sport renders its practitioners part of an utterly different class of athlete. Skateboarding lends itself to poetry in a way that other sports don’t: the regular theater-making of everyday surroundings, the cadence of wheels against concrete, the appetite for risk and the aptitude for fiasco—The Skater, like The Artist, holds within themselves a brash and reckless desire to transform their surroundings to their liking, regardless of the detriment the act may cause to their self.

Perhaps this is why skaters make such wonderful muses. The miraculous, ephemeral nature of skate tricks beg to be celebrated, and necessitate documentation. At least, Jacob Rosenberg recognized as such as he roamed the streets of the Bay Area in the late 1980s and 1990s, capturing bright-eyed skaters that were later to be recognized as titans in the skateboarding scene. Rosenberg married the videos he made on the streets of the Bay Area Peninsula with music coming out of the adjacent blossoming hip-hop scene, and produced some of the most foundational skate videos of the period, working alongside Mike Ternasky at skateboard brand Plan B to document a period that fundamentally impacted the way skateboarding—and arguably, American underground culture—became ingratiated into the popular imagination.

Now, Rosenberg debuts Right Before My Eyes, a documentary photo book that draws from the director’s extensive personal archive of the epoch. With over 268 never-before-seen images (including those of professional skateboarder Mike Carroll, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Del the Funky Homosapien, among other members of the  hip-hop collective Hieroglyphics), Rosenberg offers a unique glimpse of a community right at the precipice of explosion, his gaze tender, the stories he tells as intimate as the moment in which they were taken. With 1000 standard editions and 143 signed and numbered collector’s editions (all hand-packed and shipped by Rosenberg himself, he tells me), the book is as much about hip-hop and skateboarding as it is about his own relationship to the scenes, and his place as the archivist of the moment. There’s this sentimental urgency communicated throughout the book: Capture this time now, he seems to impart, it will only change from here.

In conjunction with the book, eponymous exhibition Right Before My Eyes is on view at HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in Los Angeles until January 20th. Padding the Hi8 video stills with film strips, demo cassettes, and vintage LPs, the exhibition offers a more comprehensive look into the synthesis of skate culture and hip-hop culture between 1988 and 1998.

A little over a month ago, Rosenberg held the opening reception for the exhibition at the gallery. The event was packed, among its numerous patrons small children and retirees, awkward teenagers whose faces were half obscured by oversized beanies rubbing shoulders with handsome young skaters clutching drinks and laughing at jokes told by unmistakable Art World disciples. The event—like Rosenberg’s craft itself–was a testament to the colloquial, enduring beauty of the skate scene and its community, one that was (and still is) undeniably full of artists; one undeniably worth watching; one undeniably worth keeping alive.