Deanna Templeton

Deanna Templeton was born and raised in Huntington Beach, California. As a teenager, she discovered and was inspired by punk rock.[2]

Deanna met Ed Templeton at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert when he was 15 and she was 18. She recalls, "[h]e looked older and I looked younger so we met somewhere in the middle."[2] Two weeks later, they went on a date, and two weeks after that, they were girlfriend and boyfriend.[5] The two were married three years later in 1991.[6] They both became vegetarian in 1990, vegan in 1991, and have not consumed meat or dairy products since.[7]

Templeton started to pursue photography at the age of 15 when her mother gifted her a camera.[2] She used the camera to explore and document the local Los Angeles punk scene.[1]

Early in her photography career, Templeton traveled with her husband and other professional skateboarders on their international tours, documenting the scene. Templeton's photographs from that period embody a unique perspective of skateboarding and skateboard culture because they reflect a female perspective of a sport which, at the time, was documented and dominated by men.[2] In 2007, she published the book Your Logo Here; the photographs capture young girls offering their bodies to their skateboard idols for them to sign and for skate companies to "brand" with spray paint templates.[2][8] Photographs from Your Logo Here culminated in an exhibition titled Scratch My Name On Your Arm, which traveled throughout Europe in 2009; drawing inspiration from the punk scene that inspired her as a teenager, Templeton appropriated her exhibition's title from a Smith's song.

She continued to explore the body with her 2016 book Swimming Pool, in which she photographed her friends who were invited to skinny dip in her pool; she documented these scenes over eight years in both color and black-and-white photographs.[9]

For around 20 years, Templeton made street portraits of young women that she collected in the book What She Said (2021). The portraits are contrasted with journal entries from her own adolescence in the 1980s.[10][11][12][13][14]