Julien Petry Gallerie

“I found a camera in a bus one day.”

That’s how Julien “Perly” Petry explains how he became a photographer. As for how he got his nickname? It came out of a slightly questionable night with friends somewhere near the Swiss/French border, after spotting the name of that village on a highway sign. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as the story goes. I never managed to get much more out of him.

Perly grew up far from the mountains in northeastern France, where he began skateboarding at a young age. He discovered snowboarding with his dad around age 14, during holidays spent at his grandmother’s place in the Alps. From then on, Perly was at least partially raised by skateboard and snowboard media. He says that Jamie Mosberg’s 1996 snowboard film “Tales of the Kryp” was in heavy rotation during his youth, suffering serious abuse via laps through the family VCR.

Little by little, he got more serious about snowboarding, helping form the Advita crew in Avoriaz, France, in the mid-2000s. Avoriaz was basically the Mecca of European snowboarding at the time and they all lived in an apartment together. The Advita aesthetic developed accordingly: giant baggy pants, T-shirts down to the knees and an attitude imported directly from Forum 8 and the finest gangsta rap videos MTV had to offer.

During the summers, Perly worked with his dad in the family smoked salmon business, which allowed him to finance his winters, and fatefully, buy himself a Sony VX2000, the Holy Grail for an entire generation of skate and snowboard filmers. Perly and the Advita crew started filming each other and putting out a few clips of varying degrees of memorability. (Thankfully, time has done some quality control for us, and most of these videos are lost to the sands of MiniDV time.)

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