The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 3
AXEL ADOLFSSON'S BIGGER PICTURE
Words: Tobias Liljeroth. Photos and Captions: Axel Adolfsson 2022-11-25 12:11:59
A full-time gourmet chef living in Brunnen, Switzerland, Christian Vogel showed me around his home resort of Stoos in 2021. On just our second backside run, the light and snow were perfect and the backdrop was magic—a special moment with a good friend.
In early September, all of Stockholm was plastered with campaign posters for Sweden’s upcoming general election. One of the posters featured a bespectacled character with a wry smile, standing in the middle of a sunny street flanked by single-family homes with branches from verdant apple trees hanging out over wooden fences. It was an idyllic scene meant to portray trust and comfort, featuring Sweden’s soon-to-be prime minister, Ulf Kristersson.
About the same time, a different type of propaganda landed on doorsteps across the country—the fall issue of Swedish ski magazine Åka Skidor. The publication set imaginations alight, particularly a 10-page feature from Italy’s Cortina d’Ampezzo in the heart of the mighty Dolomites. Mountains, adventure, food, culture—the images evoked a rugged beauty that felt foreign and a tad dangerous, the kind of story that makes you book a plane ticket immediately.
At the center of the two opposing forces, and of those two projects, sits 29-year-old Axel Adolfsson. Part-time political photographer and part-time mountain creative, Adolfsson walks with a foot in each world, not only creating, but also living the contrasts of his push-pull duality.
In many ways, Adolfsson’s story reflects those of many successful Swedish skiers and ski photographers. He grew up in an academic home in Skövde, in southwestern Sweden. The closest thing Adolfsson had to skiing there was 997-vertical-foot Billingen, a place where cross-country skiing was preferred over alpine. The Adolfsson family did have a holiday home in the ski resort of Sälen, some five hours north, but they usually only visited for about 15 days spread over the winter holidays. That was a teaser for the young Adolfsson, and it was enough to get his wheels spinning.
By the time Adolfsson was in his teens, he dreamed of spending a winter in the Alps. A week after high school graduation, he and his friend Victor Daggberg headed to Oslo, Norway and worked two jobs each for seven months to make that dream a reality. At 19, he and Daggberg spent a full winter on skis between the French, Swiss and Austrian Alps, living out of a beat-up rear-wheel-drive BMW 3-series.
“We had no clue what we were doing and what we had gotten ourselves into,” Adolfsson says. “Our skis were beat and heavy, and our avalanche safety knowledge was even worse. We had watched a bunch of ski movies during the fall and we thought it looked nice to ski powder just like the pros.”
But something else happened on that rite-laced journey. Before he left Sweden, he bought his first camera, a Nikon D5100 with two lenses, an 18-55mm and a 55-200mm. Adolfsson’s father was an avid hobby photographer and cameras were always lying around the house. After his older brother Gustaf started picking them up, Adolfsson learned the basics and began building on his skills by bringing family cameras to the mountains in his teens. “I got hooked right away,” he says. “The kick of shooting and realizing I had captured a proper banger was invigorating.”
The new camera wasn’t just a hobby however—it was a window into a whole new world. Together with Daggberg, Adolfsson started a photo-infused blog named “Yweski”—why we ski. During that 2013 season, Adolfsson dove headfirst into his craft. When his work started getting notice (and eventually print space) with outlets such as Sweden’s freeski forum freeride.se, a bigger picture came into focus.
“To see my own work right next to my [photography and ski] heroes still blows my mind a bit,” Adolfsson admits. “To see how far I can take it is still what drives me.”
After his big break with freeride.se, Adolfsson began publishing photos with Åka Skidor. In 2020, the young Swede jumped the pond and moved to the front of the line, snagging his first cover shot for U.S.-based Freeskier, an image of Joel Pollinger submarining on a picture-perfect March powder day in Engelberg, Switzerland.
But even with Adolfsson’s photography career taking off, the young Swede’s root system continued to grow in other directions. He began studying engineering at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in 2017. There, he developed an undergraduate thesis on the connection between skiing and climate change. As a skier since childhood, he was worried about what a warmer climate might do to his favorite sport. It wasn’t enough to watch from the sidelines, he wanted to be involved.
Adolfsson got in touch with Johnn Andersson from Protect Our Winters Sweden. Andersson had an idea about a ski movie with an environmental focus and quickly tapped Adolfsson, his brother Gustaf, and Daggberg to bring it to life. The idea was to take the train north to Hunddalen to ski tour and promote sustainable tourism. Staying in a cabin without running water and with a 12-volt battery to charge their heavy camera gear, Andersson’s idea was to showcase great skiing with minimal carbon dioxide emissions.
Named Eisodus, the film was released in October 2017, but it failed to impact the ski community as much as the crew had hoped. Today, years later, Adolfsson is skeptical about the film’s execution, saying that it more or less shamed the viewer about their choices when it comes to skiing, telling them to change their lives.
“To stop traveling to ski resorts won’t stop the emissions of greenhouse gases,” Adolfsson says. He gets frustrated with binary logic and likes to question commonly held ideals. It’s not a matter of stoking the argument, but rather his way of analyzing the larger problem. “We need to find other ways to produce energy instead of burning coal, or to get nations to change their views on shutting down their nuclear power plants,” he adds.
While he feels the film fell short, he is a still a fan of some of the more subtle messages brought forward in the movie. He prefers the project’s final line, one that reads, “I’ve come to understand that what I need is an open mind, a belief and understanding in more than the present. Only then my endeavor to reach further will succeed.”
It’s a message Adolfsson took with him on both professional and personal levels, using the project as a stepping stone to leave school and begin a career in ski visuals. But he hasn’t stopped at skiing. In addition to his success in the ski publication world and working for outdoor brands like Peak Performance, Adolfsson has developed a path in political media.
“Former Swedish prime minister Göran Persson once said that politics is the highest form of intellectual occupation you can indulge yourself in,” Adolfsson says. “So when you’re photographing it, you have a lot of different factors to take into account, not just the object itself.” He adds that photographing politicians isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem at first—as a former youth party member of the Moderaterna party, he admits that he has a lot of old friends within the organization who need photos on the campaign trail.
In his political work, Adolfsson takes the same kind of approach as he does with shooting skiing, though on paper those worlds couldn’t seem further apart. Having experience in both has allowed him to draw from each to create his own unique light in contrasting worlds.
When tasked with photographing a big-name politician like Kristersson, for example, Adolfsson says it’s best to boil the moment down to the relationship between two people rather than create separation between the photographer and the photographed. It’s the same way he approaches shooting skiing, working through dynamic conditions and finding common ground to build a relationship in a matter of minutes. “There needs to be a certain chemistry between me and the skier to make it work,” Adolfsson says. “You can never fully explain to the skier how I see the shot, and the skier can never really explain how his turn is going to pan out. That creates a specific bond and a deep relationship between us as humans.”
Adolfsson knows that even the best visions can change, but has found a niche in being able to evolve with them. He saw a future in skiing and politics, but couldn’t have imagined he’d live in both realms at the same time. He’s charted that course from behind the lens, taking new opportunities and using each detour as a means to lean deeper into the unexpected.
“That’s what I’m looking for as a photographer,” Adolfsson explains, “a story with a twist in the end that makes the audience keep thinking about what’s next.”
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