The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 17.4
TOTAL IMMERSION: Scrap’d for the Season
Words: Colin Wiseman 2020-01-23 20:31:50
It began in Austria. Legendary photographer Dean Blotto Gray and Burton marketing guru Zach Nigro were there gathering marketing collateral going into the winter. Consumed by daily digital demands, they decided to make something tangible.
“We decided to do scrapbooks because we thought it’d be fun to stray away from the smart phone,” Blotto says. “When we were on trips, we felt like working on books would be a good way to go beyond thumbing through a screen.”
The two agreed to document their personal travels for the winter then compare notes. But it morphed into something more: a collaborative project with friends along the way. “Originally, we thought we’d write a few things in it, like a journal,” Nigro says, “but we ended up mostly doing artwork with other people. And looking at it now, that artwork can trigger a memory, a story. I’ll show mine to Blotto and it’ll bring me back to the moment in a way that’s totally different from an Instagram post that’s gone in a day.”
Zach would crack his book and begin working, and collaboration would happen organically. For instance, “I was drawing at Baldface [Lodge, BC] and Jamie Lynn walked by and said, ‘Can I get a page?’” Zach says. Mixed in with luggage tags, Polaroids and ballpoint-pen musings are works from Christian Haller, Niels Schack, and other creatively minded riders, all tied to a specific time and place—a visual diary. And while those visual diaries went to Europe, Japan, Canada and beyond, they also included time at home. “My niece and nephew are in there,” Blotto says. “It grew into this thing where I really wanted to involve everyone I was around, not just on my travels, but at home, too.”
The pair didn’t see each other for months, but their books grew in concert, Blotto adding a piece of bark from Hokkaido, Zach a collection of photos from Laax. “We’d work on them in the weirdest places,” Zach says. “From plane rides to trains, in vans, on boats, in bars, our US Open hotel room—we worked on them everywhere. If there was downtime, we’d take out our book and a little pouch of pens and art supplies and start drawing.”
Sometimes their travels aligned and the two collaborated in person, like on a trip to Svalbard, Norway in the spring. “My personal favorite place to scrapbook was floating on a boat in the Arctic Circle after hiking up and riding these insane lines,” Blotto says. “We were sitting there looking back at our tracks and having Chris Benchetler draw a picture of it.”
At the US Open in March, the two hatched the idea to make an art show out of their books. In May, they spoke to a friend, Jason Robinson, at LeZot Camera Shop at home in Burlington, VT. He had an empty 1,500-square-foot room and a large-format printer. They built a miniature model of the room and got to work. “Zach and I sat in my living room for days with these little printouts and just kept moving them around until we were satisfied with how we wanted the gallery to look and then [designer] Andrew [Lakata] put it all together,” Blotto says.
Robinson donated three days of his time to printing and hanging the show, and in November, they plastered the space from floor to ceiling to create what Blotto calls “total immersion.”
Families and friends came through and partied until midnight. “People’s reactions were priceless,” Blotto says. “They started saying, ‘Man, I should put down my phone a little more often and just doodle.’”
It was a night that drew the pair back to a season spent collaborating with friends on something beyond the digital realm. “There are a lot of snowboarders who carry books around and doodle and build their own scrapbooks; we’re not the only ones doing it,” Zach says. “Even guides are drawing peaks in their notebooks—more people are doing it than you think.”
“The camaraderie that you build together with everyone pitching in on a book is pretty dang cool,” Blotto adds. “I’m very happy that I have possession of this book that has so many individuals’ contributions in it.”
While the two have discussed further shows, they don’t have any concrete plans to put together another exhibit. They have, however, already started scrapbooks for a new season—they went to Japan together last fall and brought fresh books along to start anew. “To have something tangible to hold that you made with your friends has such lasting value in your life,” Zach says. “It’s so nice to sit around and rip pages out—everyone’s working on something, playing music, hanging out. The process is the point.”
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