Christophe Margot: taking it to extremes
It took four years of working in an architect’s office to convince Christophe Margot that a life spent behind a desk was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. A year of travelling instilled the 'photojournalism bug' in him and ever since he’s been shooting a range of high adrenaline subjects in a photojournalistic style. He spoke to Joël Lacey about his photographic philosophy and his career journey from a disgruntled office worker to successful professional photographer.
You wouldn’t ordinarily expect to find the two descriptions ‘extreme skiing’ and ‘photojournalism’ in the same sentence when it comes to defining a photographer’s work. Then again, Christophe Margot is not an ordinary photographer. In a sense, he takes what appears to be a very tricky subject to shoot and then shoots it within very strict guidelines: his pictures are never cropped (except to work as panoramas) or retouched (except to pick out a colour in an otherwise mono scene, as he often shoots skiing scenes to be reproduced in black and white). In addition he tries to contextualise all of his images with a nationalistic reference to the location in the image and also by shooting the journey as well as the skiing run, and even imbues his shots of skiers travelling at high speeds with a paradoxical sense of stillness.
Cyril Neri at Les Portes du Soleil (Switzerland) 2005. EOS-1D Mark II with EF15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, shot at ISO 100, 1/100sec at f/5.6.
The road to becoming a professional photographer is rarely ever an easy one. Christophe Margot started his post-school career progression as an apprentice draughtsman at a civil engineering company, where he spent four seemingly interminable years doing a job that gave him little pleasure and no career advancement. This was a period that left him with only one solid thing to show for his time… the absolute and utter certainty that he was not going to spend the rest of his life working there.
He decided a change was needed and so he resigned and then worked for six months as a delivery driver in order to earn the money to allow him to go around the world for a year. His circumnavigation took in Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. When he got back to Switzerland, having taken hundreds and hundreds of photos, he decided that – despite having no contacts or experience – being a professional photographer was not an impossible dream, but his life’s work: he just had to find a way to do it.
He started by getting a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ job on a small regional Swiss cycling magazine, not just taking pictures, but also laying out pages and even writing. Each job he handled on the magazine presented its own contacts and indeed photographic challenges. He worked there for two years before moving to 7Sky magazine, where he complemented his action pictures with fashion, rock concerts and anything else he could get his teeth into. After that he finally earned his press card and started to get jobs shooting for regional newspapers. As his contact list expanded he was able to shoot a greater variety of subjects and to continue to develop both his style of shooting and his photographic philosophy.
Skier Dominique Perret at Alyeska (Alaska, USA) 28 March 2008. Canon EOS-1D Mark III with EF200mm f/2.8L lens, shot at ISO 100, 1/1000sec at f/8.
Christophe’s obsessive desire to become a full-time professional photographer brooked no argument: “I was so passionate about becoming a photographer that I just ignored or circumnavigated any obstacles until I had achieved my goal.” At the age of 36, 15 years after starting on his photographic journey, he still has that same feeling and indeed exudes the same enthusiasm and hunger to get better and do more.
As a counterpoint to his own love of photography he recounts, with a mounting sense of disbelief and horror, the story of a photojournalism seminar that a friend of his recently gave where, on being asked why they wanted to become photojournalists: “Many attendees said to become famous! Not to be the best at what they did, or to take great photos, but to become famous.”
For Christophe the twin philosophies of his photography are humility amalgamated with a belief in one’s own ability and a constant desire to keep improving.
In terms of his equipment Christophe has been a Canon user from day one and wholly digital since July 2002, when he got his first EOS-1D, before later complementing that with an EOS 5D. In the ‘1 series’ he graduated to the EOS-1D Mark II and now only uses an EOS-1D Mark III, whilst in terms of optics he only works with prime (fixed focal length) lenses: an EF14mm f/2.8L II USM, an EF15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, an EF20mm f/2.8 USM, an EF50mm f/1.2L USM, an EF200mm f/2.8L (which he's had since 1995), an EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM and an Extender EF 1.4x II. He shoots with prime lenses, not only because he thinks it helps with the discipline of image framing but also there are maximum aperture advantages to shooting with prime lenses that aid focusing quickly and accurately.
Skier Dominique Perret at Alyeska (Alaska, USA) on 17 April 2007. Canon EOS-1D Mark II with EF200mm f/2.8L lens shot at ISO 100, 1/1000sec at f/8.
He loves the EOS-1D Mark III for the excellent ergonomics that allow him to use fully gloved hands – a major advantage bordering on the essential when it comes to shooting pictures of unrepeatable action in bleak and almost by definition, freezing locations and conditions. It's significantly easier in the field than trying to make do with fingerless gloves and frozen fingertips.
He also appreciates the speed of focusing (last year he shot pictures of F1 debutante Toro Rosso driver Sebastien Bourdais from the back of a motorcycle whilst travelling at 180kmph), and the speed of image processing, and thus the frame rate, he can achieve when shooting unrepeatable extreme skiing pictures. Most of all he appreciates the 1D Mark III’s reliability - in all the time he’s had this camera, despite being in some of the world’s least hospitable places for cameras, he’s never had a problem or failure due to cold, moisture or dust.
It is not only technical reasons that dictate just how many 'cracks' he gets at a particular scene (or image sequence), but also physical, logistical and aesthetic reasons. Firstly, when he’s shooting at altitude he can't keep asking someone to climb back up a mountain just to get another shot. Secondly, he needs to have virgin snow as a canvas on which the rider will be 'describing' his descent (once a rider has skied down a slope, the previous run’s tracks are visible and these would make any subsequent image of the scene messy with the trails distracting compositionally from the main subject). The third reason is that it may not be possible for a rider to find an equally usable (or safe) route down on a different patch of virgin snow from the initial run. Finally, the selected backdrop for the image would no longer necessarily be available if he had to reframe the image with a new area of virgin snow.
Shot at Heliskiing in Kashmir (India), skier Seb Michaud on 8 March 2006. Canon EOS-1D Mark II with EF50mm f/1.2L USM lens, shot at ISO 100, 1/1000sec at f/5.6.
When taking skiing shots there are three factors according to Christophe: “the backdrop, the lighting and the action. If the lighting and backdrop are poor I'll hone in on the action. If the backdrop is sublime and the lighting good, I'll take what could be described as an 'environmental action shot'.”
When there's decent light, pretty much all his shots are taken at 1/1000sec at f/8 (which is a stop under what he would have habitually shot with slide film).
Christophe always shoots RAW and prefers the graphic impact of black and white images: “I love black and white because of its contrast; life,” he says, ”is all about contrast.”
Once the pictures are taken, he uses Adobe Lightroom, but he will not post-process images other than for the reasons mentioned earlier in this article. When it comes to composition and framing, except for making panoramas, he will never reframe an image, even slightly. He prefers instead to compose in-camera, a process he feels is helped not hindered by only using prime lenses, and another pointer to his photojournalistic credo. He has also welcomed a recent trend, particularly amongst US magazines, for insisting on digital negative format (DNG) images to ensure that there has been no digital manipulation of images.
Skier Dominique Perret at Alyeska (Alaska, USA) on 17 April 2007. Canon EOS-1D Mark II with EF50mm f/1.2L USM, shot at ISO 100, 1/1000sec at f/8.
Christophe describes himself primarily as a photojournalist and takes that approach to the trips he goes on. He contextualises the shoot in terms of the area (for example, Kashmir or Spiti in India), the locals and throughout a set of photos culminating in the extreme ski shots, showing the camaraderie of the riders as well as the involvement of those accompanying them or helping them prepare to arrive at their destination.
His methodology is a deceptively simple one: “I am always ready to take a photograph and I always try to tell a little story and to contextualise where I am and what is being done”, he explains. When travelling to distant destinations for way-off-piste skiing shots, one of the reasons for this approach becomes a little clearer.
“In some locations, there is no guarantee that you will actually get to where you are going”, which might make the photographic element of the trip rather unrewarding if he were only shooting action images on the slopes.
“For example, when we were going to Spiti, there was a big chance that the road we needed to take to get there would be impassable owing to avalanches,” he explains. Luckily for him and the riders he went to photograph, it wasn’t.
Spiti Valley, India, 29 January 2006. EOS-1D Mark II with EF50mm f/1.2L USM, shot at ISO 100, 1/500sec at f/8.
Some of his work is less logistically problematic, although it could hardly be described as prosaic. He provides photography for the Freeride World Tour (the extreme skiing and snowboarding world cup competition) and he is a photographic stringer for the New York Times travel desk. He first got involved with the New York Times when one of their correspondents e-mailed him to get a report of snow conditions in Switzerland and he was able to exploit that initial contact into a commission to take pictures to accompany their travel pieces. Christophe has also done work for Red Bull (working with what he describes as “super-athletes”); Scott USA (shooting skiers and bike riders for brochures and images supporting sponsored athletes); a multitude of bike magazines and the Philip Morris Marlboro Adventures (akin to the Camel Trophy).
Christophe still finds time to organise trips with riders he knows to new skiing locations. He describes himself as a “photographer who skis rather than a skier who photographs”, but he is competent and his knowledge of the sport allows him to know where and how to compose his action shots. The other element that is crucial not only to his photography, but also to his survival, is the element of teamwork.
Shot on 17 April 2007 this shows skier Dominique Perret at Alyeska (Alaska, USA). Canon EOS-1D Mark II with EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM fitted with 1.4x extender (taking it to 420mm), shot at ISO 100 for 1/1000sec at f/8.
“When you are working in the mountains, you need to work as a team, whether with the riders or when you are working with a film crew,” says Christophe. This co-operative spirit is evidenced by the fact that although some of the shoots come from sponsors, he also goes on trips organised by the riders themselves, where the collaborative experience of the trip extends to the creation of the journey.
But can one easily sum up Christophe Margot’s work? His range of styles and jobs covers the action shot and the environmental portrait; his travel pieces – even the commissioned ones – are more photojournalistic than commercial and his skiing shots could equally well be described as 'graphic art' as they could 'extreme sports photography'. He’s done commercial shoots for watch and clockmakers, magazine features on paintballing, portraits of the Dalai Lama in India, underwater photography at Maayafushi Island, travel photography from Istanbul to Alaska and from Rio to Yemen, and even (as a one-off) a rather special wedding.
Skier Seb Michaud shot at Heliskiing in Kashmir, India, on 4 March 2006. Canon EOS-1D Mark II with EF300mm f/4L IS USM lens, shot at ISO 100 for 1/1000sec.
So, while there is little doubt as to his expertise in extreme skiing photography, he is, in short, rather harder to categorise than the average photographer. There is no convenient pigeonhole for what he does, rather there is an intangible thread of things seen and stories told that runs thoughout all of his work.
Whilst Christophe Margot’s exposures for action shots in good lighting on virgin snow are pretty consistent, and although he is a fan of Weegee, for this photojournalist it isn’t simply a question of 1/1000sec at “f/8 and be there”; it is literally as well as metaphorically as much about the journey as the destination.
- Technical
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Christophe Margot’s equipment:
Cameras:
EOS-1D Mark III
EOS 5D
Lenses:
EF14mm f/2.8L II USM
EF15mm f/2.8 Fisheye
EF20mm f/2.8 USM
EF50mm f/1.2L USM
EF200mm f/2.8L (since 1995)
EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM
Accessories:
Extender EF 1.4x II
