Gallerie

20 Pages 20 Years with Dean “Blotto” Gray

20 Pages 20 Years with Dean “Blotto” Gray
First appearance of the superpipe cutter in the USA at Winter Park, CO, cut and groomed by Pat Malendoski. It was a blast to see a 22-foot pipe in America, a game changer, the new contest era had begun. Jeff Curtes is holding the flash to the left—I’m guessing I handed my camera to one of the riders to capture this picture of me. My pants are in line with today’s fit. 2005.
Words Lukas Huffman. Photos and Captions Dean “Blotto” Gray

It was 1996 and Dean “Blotto” Gray was at the legendary Vail quarterpipe on his first photo assignment for Technine. Hailing from Arizona, he was 27 years old. He’d been snowboarding for years, but he had never taken a single sports photo in his life.

Blotto did have a dream to work in the snowboard industry. He had a camera and, he says, “Because of reading Thrasher magazine my whole life, I understood how to shoot a quarterpipe. I knew that I needed the lip, the rider and the sky.”

He followed his skate-mag informed creative instinct and snapped photos of riders blasting off the lip into the sky. One frame from that very first roll of film—a photo of Travis Parker with a cast on his wrist doing an air to fakie—got published in Kevin Zacher’s Stick Magazine.

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