The Powder

The Powder is Jocko Weyland's artist's book on the golden era of American ski culture, built around growing up skiing in Colorado in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Assembled from found and archival imagery, the book sets skiing before its absorption into big commercial resorts and before snowboarding reshaped the sport, recovering a period when the culture around skiing was scrappier, weirder and closer to the counterculture aesthetics of the decade than to the branded resort imagery that came to define the sport later. Published by Dashwood Books in a first edition of 500 copies and designed by Hans Seeger, the book pairs skiing imagery with the loose, collage-like sequencing characteristic of Weyland's other publications.

Weyland, born in Helsinki in 1967, is a writer, artist and curator whose books include The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World (Grove Press, 2002) and, also with Dashwood, Danny's Lot, Geomancy and Egg Strike on Orchard. He founded the serial publication Elk in 2003 and later served as Chief Curator at MOCA Tucson; his recurring interest in vernacular American subcultures — skateboarding in The Answer Is Never, skiing in The Powder — runs through both his writing and his artist's books.