The Ski Journal - Volume 14, Issue 3
FREDRIK MARMSATER'S HIGH MOUNTAIN CHEMISTRY
Words: Frederick Reimers. Photos and Captions: Fredrik Marmsater 2020-12-09 18:01:53
Andrew McLean on Sultana Ridge on Mt. Foraker, AK, en route to recording the first ski descent in 2009. The sister peak to Denali, the 17, 400-foot Sultana gets way less traffic and has a far lower summit success rate.
Until digital cameras came along, photography was chemistry. It’s easy to picture the darkroom and its trays of chemicals: hydroquinone, acetic acid, ammonium thiosulfate—the developer, the stop bath and the fixer. But even the creative act of opening the shutter, allowing photons into the camera to oxidize halide crystals in the film, is chemical reaction.
Before he became a photographer at age 35, Fredrik Marmsater was a biochemist, creating cancer medications for a pharmaceutical company in Boulder, CO. When he quit in 2010, burned out and disillusioned by, as he says, “medical research for profit,” he left behind the test tubes and lab coats (not to mention the generous salary), but retained the skill of visual problem solving.
“Organic chemistry is a lot of three-dimensional models,” Marmsater says, drinking a beer at a Grand Teton Brewing near his home in Victor, ID. “Picturing molecules and electrons and how they dock into proteins in a reaction—I could always visualize it.” It’s similar to the way he now visualizes a photograph before he even lifts his camera. “It’s how you see a setting, and how you put your subject in that setting, and being able to read a topo map and figure out the right spot to shoot for backlighting,” he says, speaking quickly and with a vestige of accent from his native Sweden. “I’m a sucker for backlighting.”
So too, apparently, are the dozens of magazines and commercial clients for whom Marmsater has become a go-to lensman over the last decade, from Patagonia to Trail Runner to myriad ski publications. But Marmsater is almost more legendary for how he gets his shots than what he captures within them. Far from posting up at some sunny terrain park or halfway down Jackson Hole’s Hobacks after the privilege of an early tram, Marmsater is typically found in very remote and steep terrain taking the same risks as the ski mountaineers he’s shooting—and moving just as quickly. “He’s one of the few photographers who can set a bootpack with his pack full of 40 extra pounds of lenses and still pull away from you,” pro skier Griffin Post says. “He’s a beast.”
Like Jimmy Chin, Marmsater has made a career out of being out there amongst it. As The Ski Journal photo editor Andrew Marshall put it, “as in surfing, some people nail it from the beach or the boat, while others are actually in the water, shooting inside the barrel.”
Those foot-powered settings combine with Marmsater’s carefully plotted compositions to convey motion and a sense of almost inevitable arrival, of a difficult challenge met with grace and skill. A runner bounds high on a ridgetop with mountains to the horizon; a skier is poised mid-turn halfway down an impossible couloir, implying the achievement of just getting to that remote, ethereal place. It’s in the way Marmsater organizes his lines, leading the eye through the subject to the destination, and in the way those subjects are anointed with light. Often it’s backlight illuminating a plume of powder or a striding trail runner like some divine spotlight.
Marmsater was born in Stockholm but moved to Panama City, FL during high school when his father’s work as an engineer took the Marmsater family there. “It was quite a culture shock in a lot of ways,” Marmsater says of living in the Gulf Coast town. There was, of course, no skiing. Like a lot of Swedes, he’d grown up riding the button lift on the local hill under lights after school. In Florida, he kept active playing volleyball, soccer and waterskiing. “I was a garbage student, actually,” he says. It wasn’t until community college that he met a chemistry teacher who turned his academic career around. “She put the screws to me and held me accountable,” he says. “Once I applied myself, I found chemistry just clicked. I could see it.”
It clicked well enough that after two years at Florida State University, Marmsater had his pick of doctorate programs, ultimately choosing the University of Utah because the students assigned to tour him around campus took him skiing instead. He felt right at home. “I’d only been on skis twice since moving from Sweden,” he says, “but skiing had always been my favorite sport.”
At Utah, he rediscovered skiing, falling in with a then-still-small late-’90s dawn patrol crew consisting mainly of Black Diamond employees. “Skiing in the Wasatch changed my life,” Marmsater says. Among his ski partners was Andrew McLean, at that time working on The Chuting Gallery, his iconic 1998 guidebook to the steepest lines in the Wasatch. Marmsater impressed him enough that in 2009, five years after Marmsater and his wife had both taken jobs in Boulder, McLean included him on a first-descent mission of Sultana Ridge, on Alaska’s formidable 17,400-foot Mount Foraker. Marmsater had been working on his photography and landed an assignment from McLean’s sponsor Mountain Hardwear. After turning in his shots from the successful descent, the company’s photo editor actually doubled his fee without prompting. That vote of confidence helped give Marmsater the conviction to take the step he’d been mulling for some time—quitting his pharma job. “It’s impossible to know if your stuff is any good until someone who knows tells you it is,” he says.
At the pharmaceutical company, Marmsater says, “I’d achieved some of the things I wanted to do, but it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be at all.” The high-pressure career came with some challenging ethics, he says, like when “you have to make the inevitable decision to kill a project because there isn’t enough return on investment, even though you know it will work.”
The money he was making no longer seemed enough. “I was giving the best years of my life to the company,” he says.
With his wife Shireen’s blessing, Marmsater quit and turned to photography full time. “Everyone told me it was the worst time to become a professional photographer,” he says. Digital was emerging as the dominant format, increasing accessibility, and therefore competition. But competition wasn’t something that intimidated Marmsater—in his free time, he was a semi-pro mountain bike racer, reaching the podium at 24-hour races all over North America. Besides, he’d already worked his way up the cutthroat corporate ladder doing something that seemed far less fun.
Five months later, his house burned down in the Fourmile Canyon Fire. The September 2010 blaze destroyed 168 homes in a canyon above Boulder. Marmsater and Shireen lost everything. “That was a shock to the system,” he says. “That house was a huge part of our net worth, and at one point wrangling with the insurance company, we were going to owe money on a house that no longer existed.”
Rather than dissuade him from his nascent photography career, however, it made him double down. He threw himself into his new job tirelessly, relying on the work ethic he’d developed earning his doctorate in chemistry. “Nothing taught me perseverance like grad school,” he says.
That perseverance also gave him an edge over the photographers he was competing against. He shot six days a week and relied on the fitness he’d established during his decade of mountain bike racing in order to keep up with his subjects. These days, he doesn’t have to shoot as often, a perk of living closer to the settings he photographs and being able to pick his days. He and Shireen moved to the Tetons five years ago, and his parents now live in nearby Driggs, ID. He still hasn’t felt the need to return to chemistry, despite the shrinking world of professional photography, scoring the kind of assignments that lend themselves to his industry-renowned athletic ability.
“We joke about [Marmsater] being a diesel engine,” says Zahan Billimoria, the Jackson Hole-based mountain guide best known for his work with TGR athletes. The two have skied scores of days together in the Tetons and farther afield on Mt. Rainier, WA and at high altitude in Bolivia, among other locations. “[He’s] able to keep the same steady pace from the first to the 10th lap, even at 21,000 feet,” Billimoria continues.
It’s not just fitness that makes Marmsater a great partner in the mountains, Billimoria says. “He’s an epic communicator,” a critical skill for avoiding heuristic traps in avalanche terrain. Often, in such settings, the better the shot, the bigger the risk. “He’s never afraid to speak up and say he’s spooked, or admit, ‘That shot isn’t worth it to me,’” which strengthens trust. That’s significant, says Billimoria, because if Marmsater doesn’t get the shot, he doesn’t get paid.
Such calculations are part of the methodical, scientific approach Marmsater brings to his photography. Light, angles, setting and risk are all part of the equation, as is iteration. Just as a chemist adds variables in a pharmaceutical trial, and Monet made 250 paintings of the water lilies in his garden, many of Marmsater’s photos are a modified iteration of something he’s planned and photographed before. One of his favorites, for example, is from a frigid January 2017 morning on Jackson Hole’s Mount Glory. In the image, skier Tanner Flanagan is finishing a high-speed turn, scything a plume of powder into the rosy sunrise. He is descending into the depths of the still-dark valley, but all around him the untouched slope lies illuminated and tack sharp. It’s a simple ski turn, but the lighting lends it weight.
“I’d shot almost the same photo a few days earlier, but wasn’t happy with it,” Marmsater says. “It was fine, but I realized the image needed a foreground element for balance, so we went back.” It was a frigid day—Marmsater could barely operate the camera—and there were only six inches of new snow. Yet it all came together. “That glowing light was only there for 20 seconds,” he says. “But I had my foreground, and Tanner nailed the turn. It was the only turn we shot that morning.”
Without patient athletes like Flanagan, Post and Billimoria, who are willing to wait, take direction, and repeat, Marmsater says, his work wouldn’t be possible. “I like athletes who are as exacting as I am,” he says. “When you collaborate, it’s always better. Creating something together with a partner or a team that vibes is as good as it gets.”
In other words, chemistry.
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