From Skateparks to Self-Portraits: Jake Gatehouse on Creativity and the Art of Image Making. 

For Jake Gatehouse, creativity has always been tied to movement, environment, and the unseen. Speaking with Cluster London, Jake reflects on how his formative years skateboarding in South London shaped his intuitive approach to photography.

From mastering the challenges of large-format film to crafting 51 submerged self-portraits, Jake’s work explores the delicate interplay between vulnerability and artistry. Through this conversation, we uncover the influences, processes, and motivations that define his evolving creative journey.

Hi Jake! How did skateboarding influence your creative development?

Skateboarding played a huge part in my upbringing, from forming friendships, to exploring London in this unique way on the weekends during my teenage years. I started from the age of 5 and skated regularly until a bad injury in 2019.

Skateboarding influenced my creative development due to the fact that it is an inherently creative activity. And one of which visual imagery is fundamentally attached. On one side you have how skateboarding is documented. Which is predominantly through photo and video. Working for months on end, swapping the roles of cameraman and performer with your friends to generate enough material to be edited into a video. This gave me early experience in not only making images but also recording video and using editing software.

But perhaps more importantly is the physical act of skateboarding itself. It offers a new way of perceiving your environment and of actively engaging with it in a different way. Appropriating your environment for a new use. I see a tremendous similarity to the act of image making. Both are a collaboration with your surrounding environment. An intuitive performance based on split second reactions.

In your experience, how does your background in South London inform your artistic perspective and subject matter?

Living in South London and being amongst so many different cultures is, and always will be, a blessing. I am extremely grateful to be where I am from, and how it informed my artistic perspective growing up. I was lucky to be surrounded by a lot of people and institutions that valued and encouraged the importance of self-expression.

Away from school, I spent most of my free time at Stockwell Skatepark, situated on the border with Brixton. It's such a welcoming and supportive place for people from all walks of life. And especially as a young person, having that healthy and creative outlet was amazing. 

I attended Elliott School in Putney, now known as Ark Putney Academy. Which had a rich alumnus of creatives that I looked up to a lot. I was privileged here to have many supportive teachers that really encouraged finding your own creative path. Noticing what interests you within a particular creative field and pushing that. 

As you have created 51 self-portraits over four years, how has your approach or perspective evolved throughout this process?

From the initial generation of the idea of making submerged self-portraits I was cautious to let the project develop organically. It also became apparent with the early experiments and as I continued the project, there were a few unavoidable factors that I believe were necessary to the success of the series. 

I originally wanted to have two images of the exact same body of water one with me under the water and one without whilst seemingly looking identical. This quickly became pretty much impossible due to the surface impressions made on the water as I ran in. At first, I attempted to limit these marks, but they soon became a welcome component of the work. The human body is described, alluded to or drawn by the impact and definitions made on the water, it gives away the presence of a person, a performance represented in the water. 

I also experimented with images where I concealed myself within the image on land, but I quickly decided against this and focussed entirely on water. To be underwater is to place yourself in a position of vulnerability, it is an environment where human life cannot survive. There is a period of suffocation to make each image and carry more conceptual weight in my opinion. 

The time spent underwater, which equated to exposure time was also of initial importance and one I became less concerned with whilst executing the project. I originally wanted to make 60 ten second exposures. However, carrying this out in the Scottish winter and with the equipment I was using became pretty much impossible. So, I stopped. 

Throughout the process it became clear what for me I considered to be a successful submerged self-portrait. To be successful there had to be no visible physical indication of me within the image and I must be fully submerged. No arm, leg or head sticking out of the water. As this would give the viewer something to latch onto. Working with such temperamental and unpredictable equipment and trying to time dunking under the water correctly meant there were a lot of these mis-timed images. They are entitled ‘Failed Submersions’ and I intend to make a project with them. 

The self-timer became a very important part of the image making process. And more specifically me triggering it. It was important for me to be both behind and in front of the photographic image. An unseen performance. 

As the process went on the project became more and more about capturing (or failing to capture) this event. The unseen performance of making the submerged self-portrait. So external factors such as locations became of less importance. And I actually wanted to limit the amount of contextual information surrounding the images when exhibiting them.This also resulted in becoming less worried about the aesthetics of the image. Due to the challenging nature of making the images, I cared less about the exposure and light leaks or scratches on the image. As long as some understandable visual information came through on the negative depicting  the submerged self-portrait, then that would be a success in my eyes. It was liberating. And more often than not these imperfections  in my opinion seemed an apt addition to the final images.

The only constraint being I don't like cropping images so there is no cropping within the series and as is the case in the majority of my work.

Throughout the making of these 51 submerged self-portraits, I think it boiled down to the core of what was important to make the images work in my eyes. It's fun to set rules and limitations but ultimately to break them!.