Dean blotto gray biography of william shakespeare

It was 1996 and Dean “Blotto” Gray was at the legendary Vail quarterpipe on his first photo assignment for Technine. Hailing from Arizona, he was 27 years old.

Dean blotto gray biography of william shakespeare

He’d been snowboarding for years, but he had never taken a single sports photo in his life. 

Blotto did have a dream to work in the snowboard industry. He had a camera and, he says, “Because of reading Thrasher magazine my whole life, I understood how to shoot a quarterpipe.

I knew that I needed the lip, the rider and the sky.” 

He followed his skate-mag informed creative instinct and snapped photos of riders blasting off the lip into the sky. One frame from that very first roll of film—a photo of Travis Parker with a cast on his wrist doing an air to fakie—got published in Kevin Zacher’s Stick Magazine. 

For the next 28 years and counting, Blotto’s keen power of observation and belief that he could do anything he put his mind to enabled him to live that dream, larger than almost any