Pictures and Powder

Pre-eminent photographer navigates challenging terrain to capture passion of skiing.

Don’t expect to find Jeff Cricco ’92 on a blue-bird day. When ski conditions are at their prime, he’s deep in powder, getting gravity-defying shots and capturing some of the most skilled athletes in the most remarkable places on earth.

For Cricco, one of the ski industry’s leading photographers, weather reports, avalanche warnings, and maps set the day’s agenda. “It is definitely a dream job, and it takes me all over the place,” says Cricco, who’s based just outside of Durango, Colorado. “I don’t get jobs more than two weeks in advance because you can’t plan. With ski photography, 99 percent of it is conditions and conditions where athletes can perform.”

Growing up just south of KUA’s campus, Cricco learned to ski at local mountains Arrowhead, Ascutney, and Sunapee. He raced for the alpine ski team under Coach Georg Feichtinger and recalls training with Teton Gravity Research (TGR) founder Todd Jones ’89, who, like Cricco, discovered his life’s work in the mountains. They still team up professionally, albeit in more far-flung places than the Upper Valley.

As a senior at KUA he enjoyed a class on black-and-white photography. After one term of college, he moved west to Vail, Colorado, picking up perennial ski-bum gigs as a lift operator and cook. When the Vail Daily had to quickly fill a photographer’s spot, Cricco joined the paper and changed his course.

Today, Cricco’s work appears in magazines such as Ski, Powder, Freeskier, and Backcountry. He also works with companies in the industry such as North Face and Arc’teryx, cherry picking the best days and shooting the top athletes for catalogs and marketing materials. Other days, he’s working with film companies such as TGR, shooting stills over the shoulder of a cinematographer.

“If you put your time into and direct your passion, you just stick with it,” he says. “I just kept going and it was never and easy job.”

Like the subjects of his work, Cricco is working on skis loaded down by camera gear and often perched on precarious terrain or working from a helicopter. “I took an EMT course and was a ski guide in Alaska just to help me be safer and to manage the risk that comes with the job. When you’re shooting photos, you’re pretty much a guide—you’re accessing the slope first, you’re cutting the slope, and with backcountry you’re trying to mitigate risk. Some of the riskiest work is here in Colorado, because we have the most dangerous snowpack in the country.”

This image of Vail Pass on a very cold, crisp sunrise was the cover of Powder Magazine’s Photo Annual. “Probably one of my favorite photos I’ve shot,” says Cricco. “A ski bum photographer’s coup de grâce!”

But Cricco has watched the industry— and the communities they’re based in— evolve as climate change, a resurgence in backcountry skiing, and the advent of social media collide.

Late evening light on a run called “The

This care and concern appear to spring from a healthy respect for the natural environment. “It’s so magical being up in the mountains at sunrise and at sunset in pristine conditions. It gives me renewed passion for my job.” He points to a trip to Argentina as opening his eyes to what the world offers. “The wind and the sun are nothing I had ever experienced,” he says. “That place really opened me up to traveling to more remote places and looking for extreme environments that show me how powerful the earth is.”

“There has been a real change in being in the outdoors. It used to be a skibum culture. It’s become so trendy and accessible instead of a bunch of quirky people. It’s something that everyone should experience, but it’s also something that’s serious and more dangerous than a lot of people realize,” he says, advocating for all skiers to rely on his tools of the trade: weather reports and maps.

“Of course, I’m the one who promotes it and sells it pictures and powder and that’s challenging.”

This article originally appeared in Kimball Union Magazine. Reprinted with permission.

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