Scott Serfas

Scott Serfas was born in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada where nothing separated him from the North Pole but a stained wooden fence and crushed decretive rock. At age sixteen, he was abducted from high school by an unsuspecting church organization. In a weird form of winter sports torture he was forced to ski moguls and perform daffys off the infamous lemmings leap jump under the 7th heaven chairlift on North America’s largest winter resort, Whistler-Blackcomb. This experience would end up being the original stimulus for Scott’s interest in airtime photography.

Overwhelmed by the vast terrain and deep powder of the mega resort, Scott escaped the grip of the skiing church group and acquired his first real snowboard. Later that year he moved into a friends VW van that they would park nightly underground, below the Whistler Conference Centre, where they would steal power from the last stall on the third floor to heat the ’73 Westfalia. He subsisted on leftover food from the Rendezvous restaurant a top Blackcomb Mountain and wore clothing left in the lost and found. During the early 1990′s he acquired his first proper camera. It was a Canon he scored fortuitously when a drunk French-Canadian freestyle skier, being pursued by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, stashed it along with twenty rolls of unexposed Fuji Provia film and a half bottle of Rye Whiskey in the 3rd toilet stall of Whistler’s boozy nightclub Garfinkels. Scott’s destiny was sealed. After exposing all the film shooting up-and-coming young professional snowboarders like Devun Walsh, Kevin Sansalone and Rob Dow he mustered enough courage to submit the colour slides to a local Vancouver skate/snow street press rag named Concrete Powder.

From his first photo published in Concrete Powder his fame grew. He made a fortune and spent it on bottles of Royal Reserve whiskey for the Chesterfield House parties. In 1998, the worlds largest and most prestigious snowboard magazine, Transworld SNOWboarding, recruited him as a senior photographer. Since that day he has had thousands of photos published for clients worldwide with more than 100 magazine covers to his name making him one of the world’s most prolific outdoor sport and environment photographers. Scott is known for finding a surprising perspective through his lens, spending days and even weeks flying, hiking, camping and waiting for that perfect shot.

Today, Scott still full time shoots the sports he loves; Snowboarding, Skateboarding, Surfing and Biking but recently has shifted some focus towards commercial photography working for clients such as Filson, Lululemon, Red Bull, Whistler-Blackcomb Resort and GQ. For over 25 years Scott has also managed to avoid unsuspecting church organizations and the temptation to pull Daffy’s.