Black Snow - Ari Marcopoulos

Ari Marcopoulos presents a large-format kineograph of the young Japanese snowboarder Haku Shimasaki performing a technically challenging trick. The idea for the publication came to Marcopoulos after working on his short film ‘Butter’, in which he documents elite snowboarders in Switzerland. He asked a group of them to send him their favourite clips of tricks; this one of Haku, captured by Nishizuka Zensei, stood out. Marcopoulos desaturated the clip and inverted it so it looks like a black-and-white negative. The result is not just an elegant and powerful display of the athlete’s skill – the explosive snow moving around him seems to evoke the dynamic origins of the universe.