Words: Chatham Baker 2017-12-11 21:31:14
Ketchum is a small town, and it’s not hard for newcomers to make friends. It was 2005, and I’d recently taken a job with Smith Optics as its lone in-house graphic designer. Tal had migrated east from his hometown of Gig Harbor, WA, from where he had commuted to work at Stevens Pass Ski Area. We met while spinning spring hot laps on Dollar Mountain, and became roommates a few months later.
I knew he had a Hasselblad medium-format film camera, but it was only as we became close that he let me in on his other world—photography. He had this box of black-and-white prints, skateboard rail tricks caught at the perfect moment, BMX shots with stories of being run off by cops, and portraits of friends or other skateboarders. All black and white. All stunning.
Despite their obvious quality, he had sold only a few images, offhandedly, to skateboard and BMX magazines. “Why aren’t you doing this for a living?” I’d ask repeatedly. At my job, I dealt with skiing’s best photographers daily, and came to identify that hard-to-describe quality they all shared—a quality I saw in Tal’s images. “I don’t want photography to become a job,” he’d say.
At some point, I refused to take his bullshit answer at face value. I continued trying to convince him otherwise, telling him he could earn money with his photos. At some point, he listened. He borrowed a digital SLR from Mark Epstein (of FREEZE lore), and got a paid assignment for the local Sun Valley Magazine. The fuse was lit.
Shortly after, he and I persuaded then-Smith Marketing Director Tag Kleiner to let Tal shoot stills for Smith’s newest project, Prospecting Idaho. Tal did the rest, providing enough content for an entire winter’s ad campaign. The guy could shoot, and now people knew it.
In the years since he showed me that box of black-and-white prints, his reputation has earned him an ever-growing variety of photography gigs. Alongside action sports, he’s worked on commercial projects, modeling shoots and assignments for mainstream news magazines. His clients have included Orage, K2, Saxx, Nike and Adidas, to name a few, and taken him places as exotic as the Galapagos Islands and as standard as the Wasatch Mountains of Utah—he’s even spent time shooting in studios. He’s won awards, been published everywhere, from The Ski Journal to Monster Children Magazine. Yet he still receives casual calls from individual skiers, snowboarders, skateboarders and BMXers, usually buddies asking if he’ll capture some trick they have lined up.
Tal moved to Portland, OR in 2015, returning to his Pacific Northwest roots. Shortly after, I was staying in a hotel in New York City and saw a magazine with a feature article about Dave Eggers, the famed author of books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle. Tal had taken the portrait. It was beautiful, and I was proud of him. Because while Tal has finally accepted that reluctant dream, he remains the humble construction worker, as comfortable shooting famous models as he is banging nails and dealing with 1 a.m. calls from hungover park rats.
©Funny Feelings LLC. View All Articles.