Snowboarding has always been concerned with the visual. Competitions require watching crowds, in bleachers and on TV-facing sofas, and backcountry exploits only become known through videos and photographs posted on online and published in magazines.
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As a photographer, Jérôme Tanon has been bringing these visuals out of the mountains for more than a decade, and his work has likely appeared in every publication that documents the sport. From this high vantage point, he saw something: a lack of visual representation of female riders. In the winters of 2019 and 2020, Tanon set out on a mission to remedy the situation and atone for his own complacency in it by documenting the lives of the women in snowboarding. The result is his new book, Heroes.
To elevate the collection of images, Tanon made them on a medium format Pentax 6×7 film camera. Unlike the DSLRs that action sports photographers typically wield, the Pentax can’t fire 20-shot bursts. Each roll of film only has enough capacity for ten photos. What’s more, he printed the images onto a limited collection of dead-stock paper.
In the book’s preface, Mary Walsh, a writer, photographer and former editor of Snowboarder Magazine, likens the unorthodox method to the experience of female riders: “For them, every attempt on a handrail is always as pivotal as the one before it. With camera-imposed limitations, Jérôme had to navigate the same knife’s edge of success.” For him, every shot counted, just as every photo opp, movie clip or competition heat does for these women.
Heroes highlights 30 female snowboarders in its 288 photo-, art- and story-filled pages. Here are nine riders you should know now, before adding the book to your shelf.
