Nicholas Wolken and cinematographer Leo Hoorn, Lake Tahoe, CA. We were quickly losing light on the backside of Sugar Bowl Resort. It had been a challenging day with thick fog and clouds rolling through periodically, but we stuck around trying to make the best of it. While splitboarding out of the zone and back into the resort around 5 p.m., Nico and Leo spotted this chute entry. Leo and I had a hairy vantage point atop the cliffs, but it served us well getting a top-down angle. Who needs drones when you can go billy goat around some rocks? born in Vancouver to a Swiss mum and Canadian dad and spent nearly 30 years ping-ponging between Canada and Chur, a city near Laax—long enough to call both places home. Earning a Bachelor of Communication Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver opened the door to a range of technical skills like printmaking, typography and graphic design. Aaron was spending a bunch of time riding at Whistler during his university years and started bringing his camera along. Between that and the aforementioned punk shows, Aaron explains, “I was never able to do the cool things, so I was documenting the cool things to the best of my abilities.” Following graduation from college, Aaron worked at a snow-board shop in Vancouver. With a few rolls of film in his adolescent archive, the lure of an almost identical yet higher-paid job in a Swiss snowboard shop had Aaron migrating once again. After that he held a spat of agency jobs paying slightly more than unpaid internships where, among other painful tasks, he had the tedious opportunity to rework the local municipality logo of a Capricorn three dozen times. He then worked for legendary Swiss brand Zimstern before moving to Laax full time, going freelance and never looking back. Nowadays, it’s safe to say Aaron is doing the cool things. His style was shaped early on, in part dictated by conditions and who was available around Whistler. Aaron is known for shooting from the hip while ripping around with a bunch of mates. Going snowboarding without a specific photo in mind remains a signifi-cant part of Aaron’s process and style. Sure, he’s got great technical skills and a couple of decades of experience in mucking around with light and testing more traditional angles, but the absolute pu-rity of capturing real and fleeting moments is the essence of pho-tography, and the underlying allure of Aaron’s work. His action shots are enthralling and his portraits are honest. In the latter you see people at ease. You see them relaxed with a sense of warmth. You see friendship. And that’s because Aaron is someone you want to be friends with, someone you want to be honest with, and someone you want to be like: humble, talented and kind. There are a lot of great photographers out there, but only a few whose work really sticks out with original vision. Photographers whose work one can instantly tell is theirs without even seeing the credit. Aaron is one of those photographers. His framing feels ef-fortless yet graphic. His composition reeks of context. Whether it’s a close-up, slightly long exposure where you feel the energy push-ing down through the edge of the board before the rider explodes into another turn, or a wide shot showing an entire mountain range in the background, with a lone snowboarder slashing a lip on the face below, you can tell instantly that you’re looking at life through Aaron’s lens. And, again, it makes you want to ride. AARON SCHWARTZ GALLERIE 087
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 22.1: Page 87
