Most anyone who’s paid attention to any ski or bike mags over the past two decades should know who Blake Jorgenson is. He has more than 300 magazine covers to his credit, a photo of the year award from Powder Magazine and there’s a pretty good chance many of your favourite outdoor images were crafted by his mind, eye, lens and work ethic.
He’s a genius, a father, a successful commercial photographer, but most of all he’s always thinking—and he values the art above almost anything else.
Check these highlights from Feet Banks’ conversation with Blake:
ML: What keeps you excited about making pictures?
Blake: It’s always a new opportunity. It’s always a new bag of tricks. It’s just the newness, the newness, the newness. And it always changes as you change and you grow. I read this quote the other day that the greatest fear a real artist has is the reality that you’ll never be able to get all the ideas out of your head in your lifetime. I feel like as time goes by, I have more and more ideas. And as you gain more skills, knowledge and insight, both in photography and just your life in general, it becomes more interesting.
ML: Take us back to Ontario, to growing up and trying to find a way to express your artistic ideas and drive.
Blake: I was extremely shy, lots of social anxiety. And art was just a great conduit to express myself. I was living in downtown Toronto and felt pretty uncomfortable there. Being in the downtown of a big city like that can be exciting, but isolating too. Maybe my personality wasn’t developed enough to fully absorb it, I guess—to put that energy into art. And then also in my teenage years, I got into the outdoors, whitewater kayaking, and also started skiing a bit and that led me to a trip to Whistler. And I think Whistler was the first place I’d been where I could visualize a future.
Related content from ML:
Early Whistler Days: Bike Photos & Connectivity
Blake: I remember living in an A-frame with a bunch of dudes, you know, with the perpetual cloud of bong smoke…. It was about as classic a Whistler living in your 20s as you could have. One of our roommates came home with a bike photo annual [magazine] and almost everybody in the house had a shot in it. It was like we won the Superbowl. The energy was just insane: we not only created something cool, but we had our mark on the world. And everybody in the entire bike culture, who cared anything about biking, was seeing this. It was incredibly powerful at the time.
And it was something that lifted me out of my social anxiety and created a lot of connectivity for me.
This was pre-social media and pre-digital as well. So, shooting on film. Getting those images published in a magazine was such a huge deal. Now we take for granted digital publishing because you can self-publish everything. It’s so easy. But back then the process of getting a roll of film, putting in your camera, going out there, shooting it, getting it to the lab, getting it back from the lab, looking at slides, mailing it somewhere and getting it printed was such an insane process, looking back on it. Magazines were the most powerful form of media. Movies would come out once a year but magazines would come out four times a season, or five.
One of our roommates came home with a bike photo annual [magazine] and almost everybody in the house had a shot in it. It was like we won the Superbowl.
Some Advice for Young Photogs
Blake: Your work ethic is hands down the number one most important tool that you need, not talent. Talent’s an illusion—a word that someone else uses as a description for you because they can’t understand how you got from A to B. No one ever calls themselves “talented.” That’s a third-party description: that person’s “so talented because I have no idea how much hard work they’ve put in to become who they are.” It’s almost a description of ignorance in my opinion. But you know how hard you worked. So your discipline, your work ethic, how much you put into it, is what helps you get from A to B. And for sure you’ll get lucky if you’re working to be out there all the time. If you’re out there seven days a week, you’re going to create luck and opportunity…
Listen to the full conversation here.
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