Veteran snowboard photographer Andy Wright won the Pro Photographer Showdown Thursday night for his slideshow packed with stunning, career-spanning images.
Wright, who splits his time between Portland, Oregon and, in the winter, Utah, has been a shooting snowboarding for nearly 15 years with 10 of those spent as senior staff photographer at TransWorld SNOWboardingmagazine.
Sorting through his images was “painful and fun at the same time and distracting and super easy to go down memory lane and get caught up,” he said after the win. “It’s weird because I feel like my photography has changed a lot over the years. It’s the recent stuff I’m more interested in and then classics, they stuck out in my mind… I always thought I would maybe do this at the end of my career, (but) I came to the show a couple years ago and I thought maybe it’d be better to do it while it’s still timely and (the photos) still have some impact.”
Wright says he was nervous until the moment his slideshow screened — the last of the five submissions. “I am blown away,” he said. “I honestly thought Darcy (Bacha) was going to win. His show was so incredible.”
So what’s he going to do with his $10,000 prize? “I don’t know,” he said with a laugh. “A sail boat? That’s high on the list. You’ve got to do something fun.”
The sold out competition, which runs annually as part of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival, featured nine-minute slideshows by five professional photographers from around the world. The audience chose surf photographer Chris Burkard as the People’s Choice winner.
