Meet a Creative: Mattias Fredriksson

Photographer | Producer | Writer | Editor | Brand Strategist

Home Base / Terrace, British Columbia, Canada.

Activities / Skiing (Resort, Backcountry, Nordic), Mountain Biking, Mountain Sports.

Why Mattias:

In the mountain space, Mattias Fredriksson is known globally as one of the top adventure ski and mountain biking photographers. That’s because when you see a Mattias shot you know it.

Mattias’ father was an aerial photographer. His grandfather was a painter. A cousin is a magazine illustrator. And it’s with a landscape painter’s eye that Mattias frames photos. Yes, the athlete is tack sharp and the form is perfect, but it’s how the person interacts with the landscape that makes the image compelling. Mattias bathes his subjects—the mountains and the athletes—in soft natural light. Which isn’t easy to do in remote places. You have to get up early and stay late for that. But as his long-time collaborator, the writer Leslie Anthony, says: “Mattias works like a farmer to get the shots.”

If Mattias was a painter you would categorize him as someone from the Romantic school with a tendency toward the Sublime. Wild mountains are not pastoral, they are foreboding, especially when a skier or a mountain biker is standing on a peak as the sun is setting and clouds gather head. You don’t look at such images passively. You get pulled into the scene. The tension of the moment crosses over as if it’s saying: “We need to descend now, and we’ll still be way-finding in the dark to the trailhead.”

With a Mattias shot, victory or cataclysm awaits. That’s the essence of a big day in the mountains.

This is what a fresh perspective looks like. Sandra Lahnsteiner about to drop in the Abisko mountains, Swedish Lapland. Photo: Mattias Fredriksson

So, yeah, he’s one of the top five mountain shooters ever. And he has 500 magazine covers worldwide to back up that claim—a claim he would never make. But what most people don’t know about Mattias is that his creative outlets transcend photography.

At age 12, he was a drummer in a garage band and was so passionate about music that he published what was called a Fanzine. Here’s the tween Mattias cold-calling musicians and record labels for images and going to concerts with a camera strapped around his shoulders. Later he worked as a reporter for the local paper before taking graduate journalism classes.

By that time, Mattias was already contributing stories to Swedish magazines. One of them wanted to send him to the States for the launch of Michelin’s mountain bike tires. Gary Fisher was collaborating. It was a big opportunity. “I asked my professors for one week off from school and offered to bring back a story, which was the entire purpose of my studies, but they wouldn’t have it. So I quit the program and went anyway.”

It was then that Mattias picked up photography in earnest. The Swedish magazine’s paid so little that the double income for words and photos made sense. And he liked controlling the creative. Within a short time he was hired on as the editor and photo editor of the Swedish magazine Åka Skidor, which is now the longest running print ski magazine in the world.

In that role he met the Swedish skiers taking freeskiing to Europe. It was a blitz. “I saw what athletes like Jon Olsson and Henrik Windstedt were doing,” says Mattias. “They became my friends. They were making it happen on the international stage and I wanted that as well. I knew that writing in Swedish wouldn’t get me there, but photography is a universal language. Jon and Henrik and me traveled the world together. Soon I was shooting skiing year round.”

Mattias is still connected to the best athletes in the mountain space. But this is a classic shot of Jon Olsson from 2002. Photo: Mattias Fredriksson

Naturally Mattias’ purview expanded to include commercial work, but unlike most photographers, he never gave up the editorial side. “Commercial jobs pay better of course,” says Mattias, “but when you take on those types of jobs you tend to shoot from the sidelines. I’m a skier. I want to be living these adventures with my friends. Editorial work keeps you relevant. And now, with commercial work looking more and more like editorial these days, all that storytelling set me up for native and branded content.”

And that brings this narrative and Mattias’ career full circle. Today, in addition to his freelance work (both words and photos again) with Adventure Journal and Mountain Gazette, Mattias is the editor of Interstellar, the publishing arm of Stellar Equipment—the Swedish apparel company with the global appeal.

Fittingly, for both the brand and Mattias’ worldview, none of the content he publishes on Interstellar is about the apparel company. Instead the stories are about mountains and people and industry brands he admires, the same subjects he’s been capturing his entire career.

Mountain biking is a participatory sport. And images like this make you want to participate. Holger Meyer riding in Pila, Aosta valley, Italy. Photo: Mattias Fredriksson

Specialized Skills:

Seven years ago, Mattias moved to Terrace in northern British Columbia, and as Leslie Anthony tells it, he’s as Canadian as anyone now. “He is one of those characters in a northern mountain town. He’s the Swedish guy down the street who knows where all the illegal bike trails are.” But even as Mattias is trying to stay closer to home these days, the trajectory of his life has imparted deep knowledge about how marketing works country by country. “In general in Europe you talk about the product, and in North America you show the lifestyle. But there are nuances everywhere,” he says. “I’m amazed how many companies get it wrong. You have to be intentional when you move to new markets. You have to understand the culture.”

Photo: Mattias Fredriksson

I’ve been collaborating with Mattias for 25 years. I’ve worked with a lot of photographers and the best ones are all incredibly hard working, but Mattias is all by himself in that regard. That’s saying something. He has more tolerance and stamina for the minutiae of getting it right. And it shows in his work. That was back in the film days. When he went to digital he worked even harder. With digital, you can make the shot perfect in the field. It wasn’t a laboratory with an unknown output anymore. For Mattias it is a manufacturing plant.

—Leslie Anthony, Writer | Editor | Herpetologist

Stephen Matthews riding in Verbier, Switzerland. Photo: Mattias Fredriksson

What's Next:

Mattias travels less these days by design. The work he does with brands and Interstellar keeps him connected in the business—and the landscape around Terrace affords him endless opportunities for mountain sports shooting. But he still travels afar a half dozen times a year when the story is worth telling.