20 Pages 20 Years
As Seen in The Snowboarders Journal 22.3
January 2025
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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.
For the next 28 years and counting, Blotto’s keen power of observation and belief that he could do anything he put his mind to enabled him to live that dream, larger than almost anybody in the business. As a staff photographer for Burton Snowboards and a freelancer for hire, he’s traveled the world many times over. He’s shot the most high-profile athletes winning the biggest contests. Blotto has documented heavy first descents. He’s shot underground riders at low-key backyard sessions. Blotto’s photos are published in magazines in dozens of languages and regularly used in global marketing campaigns. With almost three decades of visionary work in his portfolio, one could call him an icon of action sports photography. But that’s not what Blotto cares about.
As a lifelong snowboarder and a creative myself, I wanted to know why Blotto’s photos are so singular. How has Blotto been so prolific, and what keeps him passionate about documenting a space he’s shot for so long? While many action sports photographers lose inspiration or burn out, Blotto’s excitement for photographing snowboard culture has grown.
I’ve been an acquaintance of Blotto’s for decades and we recently sat together in his Vermont studio. There, I realized his creative voice is defined by his love for the entire spectrum of snowboarding. “I’m in Valdez on these helicopters and then I’m hiking around these snow patches in Arizona,” he said. “One is definitely not better than the other. They’re both 100-percent equal.”
Let’s call this The Blotto Perspective. Think of your favorite Blotto photos; maybe there’s a yeti in the foreground of a halfpipe shot, or a lone snowboarder doing an ollie in the middle of a glacier, or it’s Blotto’s stunned selfie with Brock Crouch boosting an air behind him. There’s a story in his images and, even more importantly, there’s a powerful sense of emotion that anybody, snowboarder or not, can feel. The Blotto Perspective invites the viewer to light up with joy, from the most hardcore mountain rats to the weekend warriors, and even suits in Manhattan with zero snowboard experience.
Regarding one of his favorite moments shooting with Danny Davis, Blotto explained, “It’s not always about hitting the biggest, high-profile feature. It’s about meandering around and all of a sudden finding something sick, and Danny’s doing some incredible snowboarding that’s setting the mood. And I’ve got to make sure that I’m capturing how special that moment is.”
It’s the mood that Blotto is after when he frames up a shot. Being on the hunt for the “mood of a session” means that Blotto can be found dangling out of a helicopter shooting long lenses in Alaska, hiking to a snow patch with his lifelong friends in Arizona, or climbing around in the rafters at Big Snow American Dream’s indoor slope in New Jersey. He’s just as interested in capturing his perception of the feelings being expressed as he is in capturing the action itself.
The amplitude of snowboard feelings is democratic. We all feel stoke at the same levels, be it a world-class shred like Danny Davis or my current self, a recreational snowboarder. As Blotto said, “That’s the beauty of snowboarding—you don’t have to be a pro, you don’t have to go far out to feel the sensation. It can be local; it can be anywhere.”
The longevity of Blotto’s career is not lost on him. “I’ve known riders like Mikkel Bang and Ben Ferguson since they were 11, 12 years old,” he said. “Then we’re in Valdez together and they’re in their early 30s and they’re at the top of their game. For me, that’s really special: to grow up 20 years with these riders. And if my photography, or just my presence, or my motivation has helped them in any way, that’s a win for me.”
Blotto stays engaged via excitement for the diversity of snowboard moments that he captures. He’s aware of how temporary these experiences are. “It’s always been about getting the best possible moment out of that millisecond, because sometimes things only happen once,” he said.
When looking at the moments Blotto has documented, we witness where we have come from as a culture and community of snowboarders. This focused retrospective is but a tiny fraction of his body of work—a concentrated and curated offering of The Blotto Perspective. It offers a glimpse of who we may become as a group of people who really, really, really love to snowboard.
“Man, I’ve always loved it all,” Blotto says. “But, I really love it all now.”
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