The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 1
STOP AND GO: Jossi Wells’ Evolving Vision
Words: Will Eginton 2022-09-09 14:00:23
“One of the highlights of my annual Winter X Games pilgrimage is to hang with Jossi. He shares my appreciation for a great black-and-white film loaded into a late ’90s point and shoot. Nothing better, some of my favorite shots of my career have come from that—this is one of them.” Photo: Chris O’Connell
Winter 2019 in Cooke City, MT. Set against the backdrop of the dramatic Absaroka Range, Jossi Wells sat atop the inrun. Below, Bobby Brown and his crew milled about. Two cameras, three friends and a 65-foot step-down. In the distance, the steady hum of snowmobilers, undoubtedly high-marking. It was a familiar situation for Jossi, a professional skier in the public lens for close to two decades. During that time, Jossi had ridden the wave from comp kid phenom to Olympian and X Games medalist. He’d filmed segments in the streets, park and backcountry. Part of an age of hyper-specialization, Jossi had always stood apart; hearkening back to the nascent days of the twin-tip era when pro skiers logged two segments a year while attending all the major competitions.
“Cameras ready.”
“Jossi in 5…”
Jossi hit the lip and initiated a 180. But rather than embodying the near-patented, statuesque style the New Zealander has built his career on, he flailed. Perhaps the cold snow slowed the takeoff; maybe the wind picked up. Whatever the reason, Jossi second-guessed the landing and blew out his shoulder.
In the realm of Jossi’s ski injuries, it wasn’t a major one. He’s broken bones, torn ligaments and even broken his neck. But in the wake of this injury, Jossi came face-to-face with the stark realization that the career he’d built—one stanchioned by elevated stakes and boundary-pushing feats—might not last forever. For what felt like the first time, Jossi needed a new line.
Fall is a special time in Wanaka, New Zealand. April light hangs low in the sky. It’s calm in a place known for its dramatic weather and bone-chilling winter winds. There’s a slowness; it’s a far cry from the frenetic lifestyle pro skiers from the Southern Hemisphere endure in the pursuit of endless winter.
It’s a time of year during which 32-year-old Jossi would normally be lapping the park with friends on another continent, chasing down the finishing licks of a segment, or working through timelines in the editing station. For nearly half of his life, he’s skipped fall in New Zealand.
“It’s the first time I’ve done this since I was a young teenager,” he says. He’s been filling his days shooting photos, building up an all-road bicycle and exploring the backroads dug into the foothills of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. “It’s kind of a trip, but it’s been interesting,” he says. “I get to experience my home in a new way, which has been really exciting to me.”
His voice has a sense of normalcy; the kind of tone you’d expect from the neighbor next door, the friend from high school who you run into after two years of living in the flat circle that has been the COVID pandemic. “I’m just embracing it,” he says. “Spending time, being like, a normal human.”
But Jossi’s life has been far from normal. Jossi’s parents landed at Cardrona Alpine Resort in the ’80s, a couple of washed-up surf bums looking to settle down. His dad, Bruce, set to work at the ski school and later in patrol, and his mom, Stacey, held administrative jobs at Cardrona. Soon after, the boys came along—Jossi, the eldest, followed by Byron, Beau, and Jackson.
The Wells children were raised on the hill, ducking out of race practice to hit jumps and slide rails. They had built a passion for skiing, and exhibited a never-ending pull toward movement that buzzed around the house. Early on, it was obvious the boys—especially Jossi—had talent.
By the time he was 14, Jossi had outgrown the local scene. Not knowing where else to turn, he sought out larger parks in the United States: Park City, Breckenridge, Mammoth. This was the time of the U.S. Open and X Games qualifiers. Events every other week. Big payouts. Open registration events where, with a bit of luck and some fast internet, you could go from broke local crusher to professional skier within a matter of days.
For most Americans pursuing this path, these events were an opportunity to prove themselves, but for Jossi, the eldest son of a blue-collar family, the stakes were higher.
For most Americans pursuing this path, these events were an opportunity to prove themselves, but for Jossi, the eldest son of a blue-collar family, the stakes were higher. The financial burden of flying halfway across the globe was such that he couldn’t just compete to see where he stacked up—he needed to perform. Each competition check bought him a few extra weeks in the United States.
He rose through the ranks quickly. Two-week trips to compete became two months, eventually morphing into full winters in the Northern Hemisphere to compete against the biggest names of that time: Simon Dumont, Tanner Hall, TJ Schiller, PK Hunder and Colby West—those were arguably the halcyon days of competitive park skiing.
Every summer and fall, the Wells family would scrap and save to prepare for the coming winter. By the time Jossi was 16, he was a contender, having made his first X Games appearance during a trip funded by busking for change with his violin. By the time he was 19, it was almost expected he’d be on the podium.
At 21, he was able to support himself strictly through skiing and were a lock for the inaugural Olympics slopestyle event in 2014. There was considerable amounts of money in the sport, and Jossi had established himself as a high-caliber athlete, landing pro-model skis with Atomic and, for a time, was even under contract with Nike.
Skiing became the Wells’ family business, and by the time the Wells brothers were profiled in this title’s first issue in 2007, business was good. Bruce assumed the role of New Zealand head freeski coach a few years later, and the younger brothers also became professional skiers. Byron and Beau found success in the halfpipe, representing New Zealand in the 2014 and 2018 Olympics. Jackson stuck to slopestyle and big air, winning a bronze medal in big air at X Games Norway in 2017. For a while it seemed like there was at least one Wells on the start list for every contest.
While the other Wells siblings had strong showings as competitive skiers, Jossi was, in many ways, leagues ahead. He was splattered across magazine covers and in ads, featured in movies such as Poor Boyz Productions’ Revolver (2010), and found his place as the style guy in a comp-jock world, winning X Games one day and racking up thousands of social media views with a zero-spin the next. He had a style that kids emulated, bridging the gap between the count-your-spins mindset of the masses and the stylistic nuance of insider-obsessed message boards.
While Jossi’s career blossomed, he watched many of his peers put the sport in their rearview. “I watched these dudes just leave. One day they were pros, and then they were just gone,” Wells says. “Guys like Schiller, whose knees just failed him, or Dumont who just quit—I didn’t fully understand it. I mean, I knew that things would change. We talked about it all the time. ‘Ahh, but what about after skiing?’ I didn’t get it; I didn’t see why it had to be a hard stop.”
Jossi had come up in the era before double cork spins, watched it escalate to triples, and been part of the movement back to doubles with the addition of absurd technicality and variation. But as the years wore on, it wasn’t the evolving tricks or the massive jumps that made it hard for Jossi to maintain his place; it was the physical toll of repetitive landings. On that cold Montana day in 2019, everything finally caught up with him.
Skiing became the Wells’ family business, and by the time the Wells brothers were profiled in this title’s first issue in 2007, business was good.
“I had a midlife crisis, I guess you could say, at 28 when I blew my shoulder,” Jossi says. “I was creeping up into my late 20s and realizing that the competitive chapter of my career was coming to a close. All of a sudden, I realized why all my friends walked away. But I was struggling to let go of it.”
He’d been a competitive skier for 15 years at that point, but he still wasn’t ready for what he calls the “after skiing” part. “I want it to be my life,” he says. “I wasn’t willing to say, ‘Well, that was a heck of a [career], now I’ll go to uni and become a lawyer.’”
Jossi tried to make a run of it after rehabbing his shoulder, issuing a public announcement in the summer of 2019 detailing a push for the 2022 Beijing Games, but by December, he quietly acknowledged it was over. “It’s hard to come back at a certain point. Each time you come back, those inruns get scarier and the landings hurt more,” he says. “So I was wrestling with this existential thing. I tried pushing down these thoughts and just getting back to the park. But after literally one session on the Stubai park course [that] October, I knew I was done.”
Skiing is an insular world, existing in a microcosm defined by individuals lionized at that intersectional point between persona and on-snow achievement. Tanner Hall is renowned for his polarizing bluntness; JP Auclair for his emotive and playful personality; Seth Morrison for his punk rock brazenness.
As Jossi speaks, you get the sense he is intentional and introspective. He has been crafting his own image for years, and is hyper-aware of his presentation on and off the hill. But as he’s grown older, his efforts have shifted away from controlling his image and toward sharing his vision.
Jossi bought his first camera more than 15 years ago. Nate Abbott, a professional photographer and friend, encouraged the purchase after witnessing Jossi’s interest in the mechanics and his attention to detail. He started out shooting film, blowing through roll after roll of Ilford HP5 black-and-white film. In the years since, he’s continued to sharpen his eye and master the medium.
These days, Wells relies on a stable of film cameras: a Mamiya 6, Leica M7 rangefinder and point-and-shoot Contax, among others. Jossi’s photographic eye, like his on-hill aesthetic, is refined. The images he creates have a warmth to them. Portraits of his brothers and father. Landscapes and street scenes snapped after close observation. Snippets of the instances and in-betweens on snow and in the mountains, light, ethereal and otherworldly. They are inviting and playful, dripping with understated cool.
For years, his passion remained a hobby, a travel companion in a life of infinite flux. But after reckoning with the end of his competition days in 2019, Jossi saw the need to take control of the next chapter in his career.
“I wasn’t willing to say, ‘Well, that was a heck of a career, now I’ll go to uni and become a lawyer.’” —Jossi Wells
“I felt a certain amount of pressure because my livelihood was my number one passion,” Jossi says. “I think some people burn out on skiing, and that’s why they walk away. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t [burned out]. But I still had obligations and relationships to maintain because it was still my job. Still is. So I had to find a way to keep pushing forward.”
Jossi steered into the creative side of his life, taking his on-snow prowess and combining it more intentionally with his photographic work. He set out to not only ski in front of the camera, but also produce and direct the content pieces in which he starred.
His latest endeavor is Deviate Films, a self-described “ski film collective” founded by Jossi and fellow former competitive pro skier, Torin Yater-Wallace. Their two films, Deviate (2020) and Good Luck (2021), showcase the same warmth Jossi brings to his photographs by celebrating the in-between moments. It’s not a massive shakeup in format nor a cinematic revolution, but rather the two skiers’ vision of what a standard ski film can entail.
“For most of my life, I had team managers watching me ski every month, or judges every other week validating what I’m doing,” Jossi explains. “Now that’s gone; it’s just me and my homies out there deep in the backcountry. And then at the end of the year, you drop a movie. But that pressure, those goals, they all are internally driven. We’re deciding what comes out and how we’re portrayed.”
“That pressure, those goals, they all are internally driven. We’re deciding what comes out and how we’re portrayed.”—Jossi Wells
As a kid rising through the ranks, Jossi would begin each season by plotting out all the competitions he wanted to win and tricks he wanted to learn. Now, rather than outlining goals, he’s crafting timelines. He’s pulling together briefs, obsessing over shot lists, and cranking out pitch decks. He’s lining up travel, building schedules, and staffing shoots. The work ethic that catapulted a small-town kid from the South Island of New Zealand to become part of skiing’s zeitgeist remains intact, the compounding effort required to get a clip replacing the compulsive urge to outperform the next guy to drop.
For a person who’s hyper-aware of his image, this shift provides Jossi with a new window into the pursuit that has defined his life since childhood. Through his newest venture, Jossi now gets to determine what success looks like.
As winter descends on New Zealand’s Southern Alps, Jossi is in the planning stages of yet another project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s hurt again, having sustained a ruptured patellar tendon—his second in two years. Facing a full Southern Hemisphere winter with his feet planted on the ground, he’s had to shift plans yet again. He hints at documenting a bike- and ski-touring mission later in the spring to cap off his light-duty winter, an inside look at the changing seasons of his lengthy ski career.
“The fire is still there,” Jossi says. “But now I feel like I have some things I want to say.”
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