REMEMBERING CARL SKOOG: A 90-minute interview with brothers Lowell and Gordy

Gordy: Yeah. Gary Brill is a long-time ski buddy of ours and people know him usually as an avalanche instructor. He defined it quickly for me after Carl’s death. He said Carl was a purist. He was not out there doing it for self promotion. He saw it as a means to continue to be out there, being outdoors doing what he loved. He never went into photography in studio work or the classic assignment stuff. It was always passionate outdoor photography. That’s what he wanted to do. I think he was able to preserve that passion because the business of shooting pictures didn’t become exclusively that—a business.

Lowell: Part of it too—any concern about spoiling a place—a lot of his pictures were iconic. They didn’t have to be any particular place. And the ones at the Mt. Baker Ski Area, again just iconic. There’s Mt. Shuksan, Mt. Baker in the background. It could be anywhere in the Baker ski area. It wasn’t easy, of course, working in that small niche but he had this sense of always being torn between selling something that he didn’t think was for sale.

Gordy: Carl was very conflicted by the nature of making photography a business. Because what he wanted to do was be out there shooting pictures, but he also had to be in the office and it just tore him apart. It was really a mental battle for him.

POWDER: Did he have a space at home?

Gordy: We shared a house in more recent years, and he worked out of the house.

Lowell: It became kind of chaotic. His office was his living space.

Gordy: It was kind of like the days of OR. His photography business had built to a certain magnitude that he just had to go off and do it. Well it’s kind of the way the office went, too. Lowell: He was at a point were he really needed to do something. He needed to separate his work and his living arrangement. He hadn’t made that move like we now have to—to clean up the mess.

POWDER: Was Carl after bigger and grander things for his photography? Or did he see his spot and know he should stick there? I mean, he wasn’t trying to be, say, Art Wolfe, was he?

Lowell: He did trips with Art Wolfe. He knew Art Wolfe and they did photo shoots together. So he had been exposed to somebody like that.

POWDER: Would we have ever seen, or may we ever see, a huge Carl Skoog exhibit at REI…

Lowell: Maybe an exhibit…

POWDER: A studio on First Avenue?

Lowell: The thing is I don’t know that he ever had the vision of, say, having a book. I think he knew what he wanted—to do trips to interesting places. And I think he was realistic enough to say that wasn’t going to produce the kind of books that you see from Art Wolfe, which tend to focus on a particular area.

Gordy: Art would probably go off with a photo theme in mind, from start to finish, but Carl would go off on a trip and say, “Oh this is cool, I’ll take pictures of this.”

Lowell: More of a photo journalist.

POWDER: Most of Carl’s photos contain a human figure. Did he see himself as either a portraitist or a landscape photographer? Lowell: He did on his own take a fair amount of scenic pictures. Just nature pictures.

Gordy: The people pictures are probably more a documentation of that trip in some form. The desert images and those kinds of things are more the art side that a lot of people didn’t see.

POWDER: If you’re going to sell a photo to a ski magazine you have to have a skier in it…

Lowell: I think what Rowell called a “person in a landscape”…that was a favorite kind of image for Carl. A human presence in a grand place.

Gordy: I wanted to come back to the thought of brothers in the outdoors. As much as we were of the same mindset and were each other’s preferred partners, whenever we weren’t in the same place—say Lowell and Carl were out on a trip—I was very conscious of the fact that I didn’t know what was going on. And if the timing was such that they were coming back late or whatever, I would worry—as a brother. Because I wasn’t there and had some sense of what could be going on, it bothered me when things didn’t seem to be quite right.

POWDER: How about when Carl would go off like he did to Argentina, and neither of you were a part of that?

Lowell: As I mentioned at the memorial, I hadn’t even known he was in Argentina when we got the call. (To Gordy) I don’t know if you knew…

Gordy: I knew, but recently he was more private about his time and I knew he was going, but I didn’t know the intimate details of it.