I was born in the suburbs of Vancouver where nothing separated me from the North Pole but a stained wooden fence and crushed rock. At age sixteen, I was abducted from high school by an unsuspecting church organization and forced to ski moguls and perform daffy’s off lemmings leap under the 7th heaven chairlift – the original stimulus for my interest in air time photography.
Overwhelmed by the vast terrain and deep powder of the two mega resorts, I escaped the grip of skiing church group and acquired my first real snowboard. Later that year, I moved into a friend’s VW van that they would park nightly underground, below the conference center, where they would steal power from the last stall of the third floor to heat the ’73 Westfalia. I subsisted on leftover food from the Rendezvous restaurant a top Blackcomb Mountain and wore clothing left in the lost and found. During the early 1990s, I acquired my first Canon camera when a drunk French-Canadian freestyle skier, being pursued by the RCMP, stashed it along with twenty rolls of unexposed Fuji Provia and a half bottle of Rye Whiskey in stall number three of the Garfinkel’s washroom. My destiny was sealed. After exposing all the film shooting up-and-coming professional snowboarders (Devun Walsh, Kevin Sansalone and Rob Dow) on Whistler Mountain, I mustered enough courage to submit the color slides to Concrete Powder magazine.
From my first photo published in Concrete Powder, my career really got legs of its own. And in 1998, the world’s largest and most prestigious snowboard magazine, Transworld SNOWboarding, recruited me as a senior photographer. Now, 13 years later, I still work for TWS as one of only four seniors, doing what I love.
For more from Scott Serfas, check out his site. And be sure to follow him on Instagram and Like him on Facebook.
