Words: Garrett Grove 2018-01-18 14:32:50
Greed, excess, overabundance, too much of a good thing—call it what you want, but skiers are a gluttonous bunch. We can’t get enough endorphins and dopamine, and will restructure our lives, empty our bank accounts, and give up conflicting ambitions just for a fix. We surround ourselves with equally afflicted members of this alternative tribe, partly because of our unifying passion and partly because it makes us feel better about shirking all responsibility.
But reality is often harsh. Holding down a job, developing non-skiing-based relationships, purchasing life-sustaining necessities and otherwise maintaining some semblance of basic functionality in society require operating within certain parameters. There are only so many hours in a day, and, to survive, you can only spend so many of those skiing.
The same limits apply to making magazines. There are endless stories to tell and endless images that deserve to be published, but you can only fit so much into 116 pages.
The editing process is painful, one that leaves no room for excess, and it’s often details behind an image that put it ahead of the rest. So I trimmed down the 21,183 photos to 432 favorites, and from those 432, just fewer than 200 will appear in the 11th volume of The Ski Journal. As a result, many of my favorite photographs end up in a folder titled “Unused.”
At The Ski Journal, we tell stories. But sometimes an image doesn’t need a narrative to do so. Sometimes we must simply satisfy that greed, dive fully into that gluttony and celebrate the glorious excess.
These are some of those photos, the ones that demanded to be pulled from the Unused folder—no story, no shame, and no apologies.
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