The Ski Journal - Volume 13, Issue 2
BACK EAST: Jeff Winterton and the Dawn of the Freeskiing Revolution
Words: Erme Catino, Photos and Captions: Jeff Winterton 2019-10-19 13:17:56
In the 1990s skiing underwent a revolution. Big mountain skiers picked up the pace, while an emerging group of park skiers incorporated stylistic expressions in the air and urban environments, influenced by snowboarders and skateboarders. It was the beginning of the freesking movement, a subculture of mainstream skiing, which at the time was driven by racing. At the heart of the park scene was East Coast photographer Jeff Winterton.
Winterton, who secured the first published photo of a rail slide by a skier—Jason Levinthal in downtown Albany, NY, in Freeze Magazine-—is now the academy director for Aztec Soccer in Topsfield, MA. He recently came across a handful of slides from the ’90s, many of which have never been seen by the public. It’s a collection that documents a critical era in skiing, one that lifted the sport out of stagnation.
As for his roots, “I started out just trying to be like Scot Schmidt,” Winterton, now 47 years old, says.
He graduated from Saint Michaels College in Colchester, VT with a bachelor’s in economics in 1993. Like many skiers before him, he packed up and headed west, landing in Telluride, CO for a pitiful winter, then later taking up residence in Alta, UT, after a couple of epic storm cycles.
“We started shooting photos of our buddies, and I was into trying to drop the biggest airs and ski the steepest lines,” Winterton recalls. He landed a sponsorship with a little travel stipend. “Everyone was trying to be like Greg Stump, and Teton Gravity Research hadn’t even released their first movie yet… I got my first published photo in 1995 in Powder. It was a landscape of Alta at night,” Winterton says.
Yet Winterton’s legacy in freeskiing took root when he moved back east to coach soccer at Union College in upstate New York. There, he answered a want ad in the newspaper. The position was for a factory-line worker at a snowboard manufacturer—it happened to be for Line Skis and his boss was Line founder Jason Levinthal. “Levinthal asked me if I smoked,” Winterton remembers. “I said, ‘Well, not cigarettes.’ He said, ‘Good,’ because his other guy was killing production with cigarette breaks.”
Winterton was a burgeoning photographer and Levinthal was establishing himself as an innovator in the ski scene, pressing his ski blades, which were designed specifically for the terrain park and based on inline skates.
“I was fixing edges to ski boards with red and white stripes with no logo and ended up shooting photos of Levinthal and Mike Nick [who won the first Winter X Games in the discipline—Levinthal placed third],” Winterton says. “We also prototyped Line’s first twin-tip ski.”
This was before Line produced the Ostness Dragon, the company’s innovative 193cm twin tip. “We’d go up to Mount Snow’s terrain park with them,” Winterton says. “They had pennies pressed in the tip and tail, and I kept breaking them. It was a cool time.”
Levinthal and company were out to disrupt the ski industry. “We would attend the trade show, and at the time the snowboard brands were in a different building than skiing,” Winterton says. “The ski side was like a tech trade convention, with people in ties shaking hands. On the snowboard side it was a party, and so much cooler. Levinthal was into that scene and had the same motivation and vision as myself: to take back skiing from snowboarding, so it didn’t die forever.”
Someone needed to document freeskiing’s infancy. Following a broken leg in 1998 from a halfpipe accident at Killington, VT—“We weren’t even allowed to go in the halfpipe, but I would go in there,” Winterton says—Winterton began reaching for his camera more often.
The timing was serendipitous as not long before the accident Freeze Magazine approached him to be their “beast in the east,” and he quickly became their go-to photographer on the East Coast. At the time, Freeze was freeskiing’s only real voice.
“We did a sunset halfpipe shoot for Fate Clothing the year I broke my leg with a bunch of kids who weren’t sponsored,” Winterton says. That same spring he went to Stratton for Freeze. “It was miserable, cloudy and rainy,” he says, but the Stratton shoot was the first time Josh Berman, founder of Level 1 Productions, was looped into the program. Berman was still an athlete at the time, riding on the then-new Dynastar Ripsticks, and the pair produced an image that wound up on Dynastar’s trade-show booth.
The following year, 1999, was when things really began to take off. “We did an article at Smugglers’ Notch with the beginnings of our crew and teed off on a 95-foot gap jump,” Winterton says. That same year Mount Snow ran the first Anti-Gravity Grail contest. Winterton joined several young freeskiers, some of which had their parents as chaperones for the photo shoot.
As Winterton began traveling with his pioneering park skiing posse, they began to find other talented skiers like Mike and Dave Crichton, who met Berman and Winterton while they were on assignment at Mont Ste-Marie, QC. It was during that trip that Winterton and Berman met Sarah Burke for the first time, too.
“She was hitting a modest 40-foot kicker at the bottom of a crappy mountain and was just hucking herself,” Winteron says. “That was the day she landed the first 1080 by a girl. Her personality was so great I can’t even describe it. She had a beautiful aura.”
“If there had not been a Jeff Winterton, there would not be a Level 1,” Berman says. “He was the glue that held together the East Coast twin tip skiing scene. It was the community he was building that I tapped into when Level 1 started.”
When Berman exploded his knee in 2000, Winterton encouraged him to take the winter semester off from school and make a ski film. “He inspired me and the rest of the athletes to do what we were all doing,” Berman says.
Winterton and Berman began to dominate coverage of the park and street scenes with skiers predominately from the East Coast. It was the first time freeskiers living in the east consistently turned heads in films and magazines. Winterton even held an underground slopestyle contest at Mount Snow. “I called it the XXX Underground Slopestyle contest. Word got out by FreerideZone.com, run by Anthony Chavez, as well as word of mouth,” Winterton says. “I am sure there was info on message boards back in the day, but I was not that technologically savy. We had kids that came down from Nova Scotia and they thought it was the coolest thing in the world. We ran it twice and we had 35 skiers train hit one of the final jumps. They just sent it.”
Winterton credits a lot of his photographic style to the skateboard magazines of his era and notes that when he moved back east, he had to make his pictures pop since the light wasn’t always that great. He started using multiple directional flashes and learned through trial and error.
“Jeff always had a knack for pushing the envelope of what film and slide photography could be in those early years,” Berman explains. “He was the first to take infrared slide film to snowsports, producing very interesting high-contrast images, unlike anything I’d seen before.”
That style was on display on the cover of Level 1’s first film, Balance (1999), which featured skier Boyd Easley. And given he was shooting slides, it took time to develop this unique style.
“It was massively different waiting for the images,” Winterton says. “I would shoot a bunch of still photography in bulk and then have it sent back to me [from the photo lab]. Sometimes I’d see it and think, ‘Wow, I was close,’ but I wasn’t quite there. In the beginning, it was simple metering. I always tried to use different films and shoot in different light, and it was all trial and error, like how to get the best results from black-and-white Scala or Kodak black-and-white High-Speed Infrared film. With flash photography it was always how to try to create fuller, more balanced light, especially with multi-flash setups that really made the action pop.”
In North America, freeskiing now reigns supreme. Whether in the backcountry, park or streets, core ski media is focused primarily on those beyond the gates. Winterton stopped shooting skiing in 2007 while recovering from shoulder surgery and awaiting the birth of his first son.
“I knew I was on the way out because life’s demands required a change of direction,” he says. “Obviously skiing and ski photography have evolved massively since I was involved. If anything, this profile will probably showcase how far photographing our sport has come. As progressive as we thought the athletes were when we were working with them in the early 2000s, the stuff I see now in Berman’s movies or Real Skifi, or X Games Real Ski, it is literally mind blowing.”
This year Level 1 turns 20 and a mutual respect remains between Berman and Winterton. “I would almost refer to Jeff as the godfather of new school skiing on the East Coast,” Berman says. “That’s the role he played; it all started with him. He had a really good understanding of what the sport needed at that point in time and brought a youthful perspective to a sport that was changing very quickly.”
Photo Caption: JP Solberg at Loon Mountain in 2003. Skiing Magazine hosted an East Coast Photographer Showdown. This shot won Most Creative, I believe.
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