ESTEVAN ORIOL (January 2011) | Interview By: Jose Ho-Guanipa

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Interview was conducted in January 2011. 

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Be sure to check out PART 2 of the interview.

Related Media & Links
Estevan Oriol.com

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Estevan Oriol // Exclusive Video Interview (Part 1) // Dubcnn


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Dubcnn: We're at SA Studios right?

Estevan: Yeah SA Studios, downtown, off skid row in East LA.

Dubcnn: Yeah man it's a crazy facility - you guys have a lot of stuff. there's a car shop downstairs, there's a tattoo shop, then you have your stuff, your work area, photography and everything.

Estevan Oriol: Yeah me and Toons have been expanding our business. We have some partners. We have three spaces next to each other. This was originally, next door was where we had joker, joker brand clothing. We had the warehouse downstairs and we had the offices downstairs with the partners, and we had the girls that did the billing and we had the art department. After me and Toons got a Nike job and Grand Theft Auto, this particular spot came here, so we moved into here. Then the next door opened up and we thought - we kind of want it low key. It's like one of those undercover locations. We just don't want a bunch of people stopping by, so we keep it low profile, we don't got a sign outside or nothing. Then the third spot opened up and we didn't want some random people moving in and saying, "Hey these guys do this and that," just running their mouth. We ended up telling a homie of ours, which was Rhyme Magazine and he ended up taking that over. And when he moved out we got some more partners and they ended up taking over the third spot. So now we have one of our partners over there, and these two spaces are our stuff. Next door is where Toons does his rides, we have our business upstairs, our marketing agency. This side we have our personal rides, and cartoon's Tattoo studio and upstairs is my office and kind of my archive and library room, which has all my negatives and it has all my footage from videos I've done and documentaries I've filmed, and all my coffee table books that's I've collected over the years of different artists and photographers. In my office is where I have the get-down - all the little shit that comes in and out. That's what I use my office for, it's kind of like a reception center. Everything comes into my office and I distribute it either to the archive room, storage or my house, wherever I gotta move it to. Then I have all the magazines, every magazine Toons and I have come out in, to this date.

Dubcnn: Yeah speaking of coffee tables books, tell us about the latest project you were working on, the LA woman thing. Definitely give some promo for that and let everyone know what's up with that.

Estevan Oriol: LA Woman is a coffee table book I came up with. My publisher Drago in Italy wanted to do a book on the LA street life gangster stuff I had done. Like tattoos, like this kind of work here. I was in the process of doing a book and a documentary called Ink and we had been working on that for four or fives years. Then every reality show with tattoos came out. Called them LA Ink ,Miami Ink, New York Ink, Las Vegas Ink, Nebraska Ink and it was just too much so we said, "Let's put this project on hold right now." They just molested the fuck out of the name; it just got ugly. Then my publisher wanted me to do a book about the street life, the LA street life culture. Everybody's kind of molesting that situation too right now. So i put that on hold. I don't really wanna be looked at like I'm coming on the bandwagon like everyone else. So my publisher says, "What do you shoot that you wanna show that people don't know you for?" And I said, "You know I shoot women for foreign magazines. Not too many people know that I do it. I wouldn't mind doing a book about that." I already have a bunch of pictures from the lowriding scene of women and from when I was touring with Cypress hill for 13 years as a tour manager. I have those photos too, of the girls that would come out to the shows. Between the old stuff and the new stuff that I shot, I felt like I had a good amount of material to put out a book. I wanted to reach a different audience. I didn't want to just reach the people that knew me. I wanted to go outside the box and reach other people that don't know anything about my photography but they picked up the book and saw the cover and liked what they saw and then they started looking through it and had to pick it up. That's the goal that I was trying to achieve with this book and I feel like I became pretty success with it.

Dubcnn: Are there any notable people or celebrities that you photographed for the book or is it just documentary type stuff and regular people?

Estevan: It's a book about LA women. We grew up to the Doors music and they had a song called "LA Woman" and I did an art show called LA woman that my friend greg Bohork curated, and it was me Cartoon, Tony Ward, Patrick Holick and Greg. And the show went well, but I just felt like it was too good of a subject and issue to just let it drop after one art show. So I figured bringing the book out. And what I wanted to show was, a lot of people talk about LA, "I hate LA it's fucking fake over there. It's just palm trees and the beach." And that shit pissed me off. A lot of the people in LA aren't from LA first of all, and those are the people talking shit. So I was like, "Fuck this, I wanna show people all the different kind of things we got in LA." So I showed them everything from movie stars, to porno stars, to strippers, to single moms, to girls in the hood, to the regular girl next door in the white neighborhoods. I mixed it up - I had Black girls, Mexicans, Asians, White girls; that's it. I mixed it up and I'm happy with it. I put out a calendar and some playing cards to set it up, get the buzz going and that worked and it worked good. A lot of people are doing calendars and playing cards and it's the thing to do. It all worked out pretty cool.

Dubcnn: Tell us how you got started as an artist, to where you are today doing so many different things artistically now.

Estevan Oriol: I got started taking pictures. In the mid 90s my dad and his wife gave me a camera and it just took off from there, it snowballed. I was on tour with Cypress Hill and I was lowriding and there was always cool shit to take pictures of, so my pops and his step-wife were like, "Hey man you gotta document that stuff, you got a cool lifestyle." Cause I was in Lifestyle Car Club and I was touring with one of the biggest bands at that time and I was seeing a lot of stuff. I went to 44 countries with Cypress and I was lowriding my ass off when I came home to la after being on tour. 'Cause when you tour with a band and work with the crew, you only get paid when you're on tour. The band gets paid year round. They're making money on the records, doing shows, they're selling merch. There's money going year round. But if you're a tour manager, or a roadie, or a stage manger, or a lighting guy, you only make money when you're on tour. I wasn't the kind of guy that wanted to work with every band. Just to be on tour. Cypress was my friends and they were cool. If I wasn't touring with them, I didn't want to be out tour. I didn't want to go out with whoever was hot. Touring is hard you know, you gotta live with people's personalities 24/7. We're all friends, so we got along cool. I've worked with artists before that, they just don't act right. They act like little women, complaining. Sometimes they complain, "Oh I don't like this food, it's hot, it's cold." There's always something they're crying about. So I was like, "Fuck this. I'm only working with the homies that's it." So when we weren't working I was like on vacation. We wouldn't be home for that long so it was cool. We'd be home for a couple weeks then go right back on the road for a couple months. I would just lowride my ass off, party hang out, just trying to figure something out. That's how I came about doing the photos. Then I learned how to hustle my photos being out tour. I was hustling them to magazines then when I came home I thought, here I have something that could be a form of side cash coming in. Some kind of extra money coming in. I went with the photos and the videos. And at that time too we had started a clothing company called Not Guilty and me and Cartoon helped a friend of ours open a store called Supermax. Then we did Not Guilty, then we did Scandalous Clothing, then Joker came in 1995 to this day it's still going pretty strong. It's been a long hard road. If you don't know what you're doing I wouldn't recommend it to nobody. Like my friend yesterday he was telling me, "Yeah I wanna start a clothing company." And I was like "Yeah go ahead." I don't wanna be a hater and be like, "Hey fuck that homes, it ain't what you think it is." 'Cause then on their way home he'll be like, "Ah he's just hating on me, he don't want me to do nothing". I go, "Hey homes, come on in, come into the game. With open arms, we're welcoming you here." I wanna see you do your thing. 'Cause people think, "Oh I have a good idea, I wanna start a clothing company. I have this one idea for a design for a t-shirt. I'm gonna start a clothing company." And I think in my head, what clothing companies do they see that has one t-shirt. Are they looking at Calvin Klein, or Ralph Lauren, or D&G? What clothing company are they looking at that has one t-shirt. Every clothing company I know has 20 t-shirts a seasons, and jackets, shirts, hats, accessories, pants, socks, shoes. Now they're doing home goods licensing, like shit like this, little pillow for the couch. If you wanna get rested up you get your little pillow. The shit is so big and nobody knows how much goes into it. They think it's I'll do one t-shirt one design, and that's my clothing line. Or I'll put my name on the shirt, and I'm so fucking hot that everyone's gonna wanna buy the shirt. It's not like that. That's not how it works. There's been thousands, maybe I'm exaggerating, there's been hundreds of clothing lines since I've been in the game, of people that thought the same way and you just see them fall apart. And these are people that have big fucking names in the game that sell millions of records, but they thought, "I sell millions of records, I sell t-shirts at the shows, I'm gonna do a clothing line and I'm gonna be fucking rich and famous". It's like you're already rich and famous, but you're not gonna do it with a clothing company, 'cause that shit is hard. You're stepping out of your realm. We came in at a time when we were doing joker, back when we started, most of the clothing companies were what you know already, the Levi's, Ralph Lauren, Dickies, all those kind of lines. Then there were African American lines like Carl Kani, before that Colors, Fubu, Phat Farm. And then there were a couple hip-hop lines like Tribal, Third Rail the graffiti line. And we came into to kind of do a line for the Latinos and it ended up crossing the lines and everybody started picking up on it, until now you can see a lot of our influence on a lot of the street brands that are out there.