Chasing Epic: The Snowboard Photography of Jeff Curtes

CHASING EPIC: THE SNOWBOARD PHOTOGRAPHS OF JEFF CURTES is not only the ultimate document of snowboarding but an impressive artistic achievement as well.

Snowboarding as a winter sport has exploded in popularity in the last 25 years. One of the most prolific and talented photographers of this extreme sport is Jeff Curtes. Curtes’s camera juxtaposes the best snowboarders of our time, including Shaun White and many others, across impossibly beautiful, majestic, and insane mountainsides. His compositions emphasize the lone individual soaring across awe-inspiring landscapes in an almost surreal and sometimes abstract figure/ground/sky relationship. Curtes’s images capture the skill, courage, and freedom that these athletes possess in their pursuit of the perfect ride.

Jeff Curtes has been at the forefront of the snowboarding industry’s imagery since his first published work back in 1992. In 1994, Curtes signed with Burton Snowboards and had been their principal photographer until 2012, nearly 20 years behind the lens on the snow. Jeff’s work with Burton, originating with action-centric images, was unique in that it came from within the core snowboarder’s lifestyle.

He was living and breathing snowboarding with his brother, Joe Curtes, as they traveled from the Midwest to the Mountains of the West Coast. Burton allowed Curtes to travel the world in search of the epic conditions that every snowboarder dreams of, and, in return, Curtes’s camera delivered an overwhelming collection of photographs to their light table. These images not only made incredible advertising and catalog content but also defined a subculture and captured the early history of snowboarding like no others before.