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In this Editor’s Note from our 2025 Photo Annual, Greta Close flips through her dad’s old photos.

It’s a Tuesday night in October, and I’m home from Washington. Since he used to live in the Cascades, Dad’s putting on a slideshow. There’s an image on the screen: Two parallel tracks overlay fresh, white, wind-drifted dollops and suspended sluffs. Down the middle dances one lone skier in a plume of snow.

It’s a killer shot. In fact—and I could be (am) biased—we’d probably consider it among the string of epic powder slashes, perfect lines and creative blends of light, terrain and skier published in the Photo Annual every year. But Dad’s oblivious to how cool I’m thinking he is. He’s texting an old friend, recollecting about a photo he never took of the girls in cellophane bikinis that year they were ski bumming at Crystal Mountain.

I can’t ski with Dad, so photos are a way for us to connect, specifically over old slides from the ’80s. He took the photo on the screen in 1986 with a Nikon FM2, a top-of-the-line film camera. At the time, he worked for Cold Smoke Photography at the then gondola-free and recently triple chair-upgraded Crystal Mountain. The FM2 was a pro-level tool for the job, he explains. With a max shutter speed of 1/4000 (very fast), it was more than capable when paired with just the right aperture and ISO. No batteries, no problems.

In this frame, I see something in my dad I haven’t before; something further buried since illness limited his ability to get up in the hills: a creative, artistic man rooted deep in the mountain life I’m just beginning to explore. A man who skied powder all day and developed film in his bedroom by night.

I wonder if there’s some salient string here: his passion for ski photos born anew in my own for written stories. And then there’s the dimension of him that’s completely separate from me. One of a person, with his own life and talent and youth and no kids to speak of—a novel concept considering he’s only ever been Dad to me.

We rarely contemplate the totality of our parents’ lives, just as they, busy with careers and kids, don’t often revisit their own youth. In this carousel of churned up memories are stories I didn’t even know my dad had. Cross-country road trips, high-alpine adventures and those girls who’d stripped down to cellophane bikinis at some house party four decades ago.

Though I’m sure he wishes he’d passed on one of those ski shots to save a frame for the plastic-wrapped gals, I don’t know that it’s the quality or content of the photos that matters in the end. Just something to jog a fond memory of old friends—the stuff that lasts long after the snow’s gone or the skiing’s taken from you.

Like an old film camera, this version of Dad was sitting somewhere in the dark, gathering dust, until tonight’s projector bulb brought it, and him, back into the light. —Greta Close

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