Alex Guiry. A portrait of the artist.
I was raised in the suburbs of Toronto, but I should have been raised on the coast. There were only three things that kept me out of trouble as a youth; snowboarding, art, and the constant dream of moving west to the mountains. Midway through high school I rented my first camera for a darkroom class and discovered my passion. Resisting my carefree reputation I worked hard and got offered early acceptance at a prestigious Canadian Art School out West. Then my father died of a heart attack. I lost my footing, postponed school and took to drinking, snowboarding, and documenting my wild nights through photography.
A year later I moved to Vancouver to enroll in photo school at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. I then realized Whistler mountain wasn’t the dream life I made it out to be. Instead I took up surfing the cold ocean of the Pacific Northwest. Every Friday after school, my friends and I would drive through the night to a different surf spot on the coast. Setting up camp in the early hours of the night, cooking our meals over a fire and waking up at dawn to put our wetsuits on, we would endure the rain, the cold, the long drives, expensive ferries, and the commodore, all for mediocre waves. This was the lifestyle that saved me, and got me back on my feet; camping, traveling, yoga, surf, and photography.This is when I began document the culture of surfing.
Over the past five years I’ve spent half my time in the studio and the other half seeking out world class surf destinations, along with their contrasting cultural views and raw subject matter. I’ve spent an extensive amount of time documenting the Pacific Northwest, Peru, Ecuador, Indonesia, and am currently on a four month stint in Mexico. My work revolves around capturing all that being a surfer on the road entails. I want to show the lives that people live, beyond their surfing abilities.
My name is Alex Guiry and I’m a fine art photographer bringing a new perspective to the surf industry.
