New York Exhibition features Victor photographer’s work
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VICTOR — A Victor-based photographer, Mark Fisher, is having his work featured in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
The exhibition is called “Who Shot Sports: a photographic history, 1843 to the Present.”
According to the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibit “highlights sport photographers and their place in the history of photography, not merely sports history.”
“It’s the first ever art exhibition of sports photography,” said Fisher, “I’m the only ski photograph in the exhibition. There’s only two other photographers that had any sort of contact with extreme sports, as much as I hate that term.”
Covering more than 150 years, the exhibit is “divided into sections that focus on themes such as the beginnings of sports photography, the Olympics, solo and team sports, portraits, life off the field, and fans.”
Fisher said he was invited to feature in the exhibit by its curator, Gail Buckland.
“Gail had reached out to me because she had seen my black and white images and liked them,” said Fisher. “We worked together to find the photo we liked for the exhibition.”
The photograph, taken in 2010 on an Alaskan glacier, is of Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, a professional skier originally from Alta, Wyoming.
In an article on Flipboard, Fisher calls the photograph “The Height of Extreme Skiing.”
“During this particular trip we traveled to Petersburg, Alaska, to ski in mountains that had rarely seen humans, let alone skiers,” Fisher writes. “The allure of Petersburg is that it’s remote, the mountains are spectacular, and no one in the “extreme skiing” community had ever tried to do what we were doing.”
Fisher says they made the shot working with Teton Gravity Research, a film company from Jackson, Wyoming.
For Fisher, the challenge, and the interest, was in finding a way to fuse art and sport.
His own description cannot be beat for eloquence.
“Hidden amongst the giant glaciers’ jumbled crevasses and the interesting shadows, was a lone skier cutting down the mountains’ blank canvas,” he writes. “The shot could rest on its own, without the skier. With the skier immersed in the environment, the image changes from a landscape photograph to a sports photograph to, in my mind, art. The second I captured this frame I knew I had succeeded in achieving my vision, and creating an image that truly transcended the world of sport.”
Fisher, who moved to Victor in 2001, has the mountains in his blood.
“I used to work as a mountain guide,” he said. “I sort of made the transition in 2006 to full time photography… I moved out here for the mountains and for the skiing. I stayed because I love it.”
Fisher founded Fisher Creative in 2011, a production house that create “the most compelling, story-driven, fresh, unique still and motion content.” Their clients include North Face, Patagonia, Red Bull, and many more.
In 2014, the company released Myanmar: Bridges to Change, a documentary about the first ascent of Southeast Asia’s disputed highest peak, Gamlang Razi.
“The Height of Extreme Skiing” can be found in a companion book released alongside the exhibition.
Read more about the photo in Fisher’s piece on Flipboard.
This article was originally published in the Teton Valley News. It is used here with permission.