Mark Fisher
“Historically, I haven’t slept that much,” Mark Fisher says, “and I’m trying to get better at that.” Indeed, finding time to sleep would be an impressive feat for the professional image creator. It’s hard to see where he’d fit it in.
Mark is an internationally active cinematographer, photographer, and director with countless expeditions and several historic accomplishments under his belt. He’s a father and longtime Teton Valley skier, climber, and recovered dirtbag.
He’s also a small business owner whose company, Fisher Creative, is perhaps the least-assuming enterprise on Victor’s Main Street. You might not notice it except for the Fisher logo hanging over a balcony that provides views of Teton Valley’s unbeatable sunsets. Inside, however, is a production house that wouldn’t look out of place in Hollywood. Soft wood accents and a grand central table lend a peaceful aura to the busy editing stations and bags of camera gear piled by the door. As I get there, a few of Mark’s staff photographers are about to head out for an afternoon shoot.
“Peace amid chaos” feels like it could be one of many unofficial Fisher mottos.
Mark has organized and captured footage around the world, from a DJ set at one of Mount Everest’s base camps to an arduous trek through the jungles of Myanmar. He’s filmed a team digging for dinosaur bones in the Gobi desert, shot fitness videos in Thailand, and chronicled ski expeditions in the Himalayas. On a 2024 trip up Mount Everest led by Teton-area Oscar-
winner Jimmy Chin, Mark’s group found the foot of Sandy Irvine, George Mallory’s climbing partner on his ill-fated, possibly first-ever summit of the mountain. Mark’s career is best summed up in one actual Fisher Creative motto: “We’ll meet you where you are and take you somewhere you’ve never been.”
An Ode to Relationships
Mark is a master of capturing bold people achieving huge feats in wild places. Yet, he insists his success isn’t due to his own skill: “Relationships have been the key to Fisher Creative,” he says.
Mark’s own origin story would make a good film. Born in Maryland, he spent his childhood living all over the map, from Dubai to Texas to Korea and beyond. As a young man, Mark was a “van life” climbing bum before becoming a mountain guide with Alpine Ascents on Denali, in the Pacific Northwest, and eventually on Kilimanjaro. He captured images of his personal adventures, usually piggybacked on his guided trips, and sold them. The stories he tells, though, center on his friends.
“The first photo I sold to Patagonia was from the General Store at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming,” Mark says. “It was a photo of my friend Ben Krasnow on a mechanical rocking horse.” That was in 2001, the year he moved to Driggs.
“Moving to Teton Valley happened organically,” he recalls. “I had some friends who mentioned it and it sounded cool, so I moved to Driggs.” He worked at Grand Targhee Resort as a server and as a cashier at Wild Bill’s, and skied every day. Rent was cheap. In 2004, he started guiding on the Grand Teton for what is now Teton Mountain Guides. Once he started earning a year’s wages in a few months on Kilimanjaro, Mark dropped everything else to make a go at photography as a career, shooting everything from weddings to products to portraits.
Mark’s love of portraiture, he explains, comes from his anchoring principal that photography is about human connection. His most celebrated photos aren’t landscapes like those of his first inspiration, Ansel Adams, but shots of people exploring them. He landed a photo in Gail Buckland’s 2016 photography book, Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present, alongside pics from such luminaries as Richard Avedon, Stanley Kubrick, Neil Leifer, and Catherine Opie. Mark’s photo was of Teton Valley athlete and Teton Gravity Research (TGR) star Sage Cattabriga-Alosa skiing a heavy line in Alaska’s
Neacola range. Which led to what Mark considers a career milestone: working with local ski film powerhouse TGR.
“Todd and Steve [Jones, co-owners of TGR] are dear friends of mine and Dirk Collins [another co-founder] gave me my first start with TGR,” Mark says about his long relationship with the region’s best-known studio. TGR first hired him to shoot a heli-skiing trip in Alaska in 2008.
“The thing I say about filmers and photographers is you pretty quickly see who has ‘It’,” says Todd Jones. “The intangible thing where someone has an eye and a vision to capture the sport and environment in a very artistic way. Fisher has always had that ‘It’ or X-factor. That is the thing you can’t train for.”
While Mark’s name is on the office door and his career is a testament to his skill and drive, he’s quick to add that for many years his counterpart at Fisher Creative was another friend, local videographer Eric Daft.
When the Canon 5D Mark II came out in 2008, the first full-frame DSLR that could also shoot Full HD video, clients started expecting more and more videography in addition to still photography.
“That was a turning point,” Mark says. He would hire Eric to take video while Mark shot stills. “In 2010 I got a grant from Eddie Bauer to ski China’s Shishapangma Peak, and it was like full-speed ahead,” Mark says of skiing the fourteenth-highest mountain in the world. “I built my home studio, then went to Shishapangma and kind of created my first standalone short film from that trip.” Mark and team didn’t reach the summit, but managed to ski without oxygen from 7,600 meters. It was Mark’s first 8,000-meter peak expedition.
“I came back and Eric edited the piece. And then I was like, ‘Eric, I want to blow this up, what do you think about full-time? I want to launch this new business and I want to work with you.’ And that winter was when we started Fisher Creative.”
“Mark has this insane drive to get the shot,” Eric says. “At the time, he was experimenting with lighting and flashes. He gets up early, stays late, and takes it super serious. Mark knows what he’s out to get and doesn’t relent until he gets it.”
Mark attributes that trait to his mentors.
“In like the tenth grade, I had an awesome instructor, Jeff Grimm, who really believed in me,” Mark says. “He would take me out through Texas taking pictures of cowboys and all around Fort Worth.”
Then Mark’s family moved to Korea, where he finished high school. His parents moved to Malaysia after Mark left for college in Wisconsin in 1994. Post-grad, he went to Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he cut his teeth under German photographer Ramesh Amruth. Ramesh told him, “You’ll be a really good photographer because you’re good with people.”
“I really got a lot of exposure to travel and different cultures and different people,” Mark says. “I fell in love with people. It’s this merging of different worlds—loving people, loving travel, loving adventure, and loving capturing it with photos. It’s more photojournalism than commercial photography.”
Open to Adventure
As a young man Mark wanted to climb and shoot pictures, but there was no dream of being an outdoor photographer. Connections made it happen. “I’ve been fortunate to have some really good chance encounters … all of these things that have happened over my life and over the life of Fisher Creative have happened because of my relationships with people,” Mark says.
Here’s how it works: Todd Jones introduced Mark to producer Jon Seidman. Jon hired Mark for a shoot on a cruise ship. It goes well and a few years later, in 2015, Jon connects the Fisher team with a project called the King’s Challenge, a super highend guided trip through the Kingdom of Bhutan led by the Prince of Bhutan. The celebrity guide on the King’s Challenge was British super-athlete Kenton Cool; he and Mark hit it off. Two years later, when global DJ icon and “godfather of trance music” Paul Oakenfold said, ‘Hey, Kenton! I want to go to Everest Base Camp and do the highest DJ set,’ Kenton said, ‘Well, you have to talk to Mark.’ So, Fisher Creative put together a team and captured the world’s highest-ever DJ set and created the film: Soundtrek Everest.
In 2018, Kenton called Mark again, this time about a trip he was guiding to the summit of Mount Everest for CNN with Olympic cyclist Victoria Pendleton and writer/TV star Ben Fogle. With only two weeks’ notice (most Everest trips take a year to plan), he pulled together the shoot. That ended up being his first Everest summit and a three-part TV
series for CNN.
“This world is also about hustle,” Todd says. “People don’t wake up every day looking to give us work. You have to go seek that out and get it and bring it to yourself. Mark has been extremely motivated to do that.”
One of the projects Mark is proudest of was when Fisher Creative crossed the lines of safety in 2022 to travel to Ukraine to film the documentary Human Unity. “Ukraine was kind of a self-funded effort because we were moved to try and have a positive impact,” Mark says. He wanted to make a film, with revenue going to the Ukrainian people fighting the Russian incursion. “Let’s highlight this amazing groundswell of support for Ukraine globally and try to make a difference,” he says. “It’s at the heart of what we’ve always wanted to do; we want to create these transformational experiences.”
So, what was the wildest trip? Eric immediately brings up their 2013 voyage to Myanmar to make a first ascent of Gamlang Razi and get the peak’s first exact altitude measurement. Over the 175-mile trip through the jungle, Eric says, he “lost 35 pounds and got trench foot; there were snakes [Mark mentions cobras and vipers], spiders. We had no real satellite phone and the last expedition was between eight and ten years before us and the trip leader died of a snake bite.” Mark points out that a trip the next year ended up bailing because of the challenges. But Fisher Creative did it.
That trip to Myanmar was originally the idea of two Teton Valley mountaineers, the late Andy Tyson and his wife Molly. Mark explains, “Andy reached out to me and invited me to come and I was like, ‘We gotta make a film on it.’ So I got sponsorship from Sony and Patagonia.” It became the acclaimed short film Myanmar: Bridges to Change and premiered at the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival.
Fisher’s team accomplished their mission, but their best memories are of the people they met along the way. One night they were sitting around camp with a group of locals who started taking turns singing folk songs. “Then it came around to Mark and me,” Eric says. “And we were stuck for a few seconds before we started singing a Grateful Dead song.” Mark chuckles at that story, one of countless tales about the connections they’ve made. The Myanmar media termed it the Myanmar American Friendship Expedition. “It was this awesome, once-in-a-lifetime bonding experience,” Mark says.
It should be noted that the prep time for Myanmar was also only a few weeks; they were on a shoot on an Alaskan cruise ship when they found out it was a go. “That’s the thing with Mark,” Eric says. “One month we’re out shooting in the canals of Venice and the next we’re on the summit of Everest.”
When asked what the toughest moment of his career has been, Mark pauses. “I think that’s an ongoing thing,” he says. “There’s been so many times where I’m like, ‘How am I going to pull this off?’ And that’s where the grit comes in. I’ve taken a lot of risk … because of that belief that we’ll make it happen.”
Finding Balance
Another thing that happened after Mark founded Fisher Creative was he became a parent. With the birth of his son, Owen, and his daughter, Zoe, his balancing act took on a whole other dimension. He learned to manage a staff, like the videographers I saw heading out as I arrived at the office. When he’s in town, family is king. He shows up for his kids’ lacrosse and hockey games, and skis with them as much as he can. For the ten-year anniversary of Fisher Creative, he and Eric took their kids to Everest Base Camp. In 2024, he and Owen went to Japan on a ski trip, and at the time of this interview Mark was about to take Zoe to London.
Asked about the balance of being a business owner, an international photographer and adventurer, and a father, he admits: “It’s been hard.
Every single year Fisher Creative has grown … and then your kids get older. It’s really hard to be away from my kids.”
When asked about his local go-to spots, he doesn’t hesitate. “My favorite is Taylor.” In the summer he hikes Taylor Mountain daily in preparation for his next trip. All winter, he skis Mount Glory. “It’s part of the dad thing. I can be up there and back in an hour and a half.” The proximity to great training grounds is just one of many things Mark loves about living in Teton Valley.
For a person who has been to so many different places, you have to wonder how he’s managed to call the same small Idaho community home for over two decades. But Mark doesn’t just live here; he chooses to live here.
“When you travel and you’ve been to some of the most amazing places, and you come home and you’re like, ‘This is one of the best places on Earth,’ it’s a pretty good feeling.”