Words Connor Davis Photos and Captions Jamie Walter WHEN Jamie Walter was a junior in high school, he set out on a college road trip with his par-ents, searching for the perfect place to earn his engineer-ing degree. His dad was an engineer. He would be one too. Columbia. Cornell. McGill. Clarkson. Happy schools full of happy people. But Walter didn’t feel that way. He couldn’t. He looked around, wondering if spending the next four years—and ultimately his life—on this path was the right move. The answer, terrifyingly, wasn’t clear. Overcome by the gravity of the decision, he returned home to southern Maine in the spring of 2010, and fell into a depression that put college, and his life, on hold. “Tinkering with cameras became my obsession,” he says. “I’d shoot anything I could, at all hours of the day and night.” He admits his first photos didn’t come out that well, but that he loved analyzing his work. “I’d step back and say, ‘All right, how do I fix that?’ I’d hop over to Google, watch endless YouTube videos, ask some questions on Newschoolers, then run back outside and try it again.” With earnings from a barista job and some initial help from his parents, Walter bought a Canon Rebel T2i, one of the first DSLRs that could shoot photo and video well, without breaking his already-tight budget. Very quickly, he gravitated toward photography, realizing he had more control over the process than with video. It didn’t take long for Walter to find inspiration from outside the ski world in skateboarding. “I was blown away by how these skate photographers used flashes and shot action in such intentional ways,” he says. “It felt like that whole scene was a bit ahead of skiing on the technology side, and I got really focused on finding ways to bring those techniques on snow.” Meanwhile, Walter found photographers who were already mastering this technical approach; people like Erik Seo, Rocky Maloney and Nate Abbott. The trio represented an early wave of new-school photography and its embrace of the countercul-ture freeski movement. Their work became his fixation. “I couldn’t get out of bed, didn’t go to school, and lost inter-est in everything,” he says. “I couldn’t do anything.” Walter felt this way for the remainder of his junior year, then the entirety of his senior year. He took GED classes from home, mainly in bed—alienating the few friends he had at school. Deep in the cloud, there were just two things that slowly brought him slivers of normalcy: skiing with his mountain friends and a website called Newschoolers.com. Self-dubbed, the “Skier’s Community,” Newschoolers was a website for skiers—particularly young ones—to watch videos, look at photos and chat with like-minded people all around the world. As Walter got deeper, he realized the online forum didn’t just encourage creativity, it celebrated it. He wanted in, and saw a chance to combine his passion for skiing with a curiosity he hadn’t felt in years. Where all roads had felt like dead ends, he’d suddenly found a way forward. GROWING UP skiing at Sugarloaf, ME, Walter had messed around with cameras—making amateur edits with his friends—but never saw it as a calling. Scrolling Newschoolers, though, he became fixated on the best videos and photos, trying to figure out how they came together in real time. Pho-tography scratched a scientific itch, an itch he figured he’d buried with his engineering ambitions. 086 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 1: Page 86
