Page 13 - Backside Volume 16 - December 2022

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GastonFr anc c

You were born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, studied journalism and started ‘So I started the first
contributing to skateboard magazines along with being a self-taught
photographer. At the age of 23, you moved to Costa Rica where you
started the skate magazine Flow. Now you live in Barcelona working as a
freelance photographer. This scratches just the surface what you have and only skateboard
done so far. Does it feel you have achieved a lot?
I am definitely a restless soul trying to do more but I do feel I have achieved
things that I did not expect I would achieve.
magazine in Central

What was your main driver moving to Costa Rica and what inspired you to
do a skatemag?
This happened by chance. I was living in Argentina, already being a skate
photographer for 10 years but as a side kick on the weekends while I was at the America.’
University and also working at the same time. I was not really pursuing
photography professionally but in Argentina I was making some money out of it
but not enough to make ends meet. I always had an itchy soul for travelling.
Always as a young kid I wanted to go travelling. So, I was waiting to finish
school and go out and travel the world. However, I finished school and went to ‘I honestly don’t remember that day
the daily grind of University instead. There came a point where the opportunity that much but Gaston is a legend and
came about to get out and explore the world as there was an opportunity in my
field of journalism to do a TV show in Costa Rica. Me and my two friends he always takes us to sick spot.’
jumped on a plane and moved to Costa Rica. A month before we left, with our
airplanes tickets already purchased, this was in 2001, Argentina had its biggest Alexis Ramirez
financial crisis in history. We had money in our pockets and the country was up
in flames, so we were like ‘we are leaving for Costa Rica, alright, see you later’.
Like this boat is sinking.
Unfortunately the TV show never happened and we were running out of money.
One of our neighbours reminded us that back in the 70´s during Argentina´s
dictatorship, a lot of Argentinians fled to Costa Rica and started doing
empanadas (meat pies) and people really liked them. I was already overworked
in the normal job environment with having a boss so anything that involved not
having a boss, I was up for it.
So we gave DIY empanadas a go and it worked alright and in the free time I was
shooting skate photos like I had done in Argentina. I was meeting the locals at
the only skatepark in Costa Rica at that time. I already had experience working
for magazines and a local distributor came up to me and asked me if we could
start a magazine. I was like ´hell yeah´ and we started the mag. France
There is a funny side story to this. I had my daily route selling empanadas.
Every day at the same time I was doing the same route as my customers were •
waiting for me. The people I was doing the mag with hired this design studio
which was on my empanadas selling route. So I had to change my route tailbone
because I could not go in the morning to sell empanadas and in the afternoon to
let them know they were doing a horrible job. It is like ‘do you want FS
•
empanadas?´ to ´this design is shit!´ Anyway, this experience was fun and
empowering to do your own thing without a boss. Those two jobs allowed me to Ramirez
travel to all of Central America.

Alexis

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