mountain photography

By 1833, when Henry Talbot experienced the frustration of trying to draw the Alpine horizon from the shore of Lake Como, the cultural shift that transformed mountainous regions from dreary wildernesses to monuments of the sublime was well established. Large-scale tourism, facilitated by improvements in transport and business organization, would develop rapidly over the following decades. Both changes made it inevitable that views of and from mountains would eventually become a staple of photography. In the mid-1850s Friedrich von Martens (1806?-85?) made panoramic photographs and another photographer, Claude-Marie Ferrier, stereoscopic views of the Alps, and others followed. Already prominent as a promoter of mountain photography, however, was the Mulhouse manufacturer and amateur glaciologist Daniel Dollfus-Ausset, who in 1849 and 1850 had brought two French daguerreotypists, Gustave Dardel and Camille Bernabé, to photograph from the shelter he had built near the Aar glacier. He also funded the Bisson brothers. By 1856 Auguste Bisson was taking panoramic Alpine images, using the wet collodion process and plates 1 m (c.3 ft) wide. In July 1860, with 25 guides and porters to carry the equipment, he attempted unsuccessfully to scale Mont Blanc, but succeeded the following year and in 1862, on both occasions obtaining pictures from the summit. In 1868 he made a final ascent that yielded 60-80 stereographs, including four more from the top. By this time, another of Dollfus's associates, Adolphe Braun, had taken spectacular climbing photographs in the Haute-Savoie. In the field of scientific mountain photography, meanwhile, Aimé Civiale (fl. 1850s-1880s) was undertaking extensive topographical surveys in the Pyrenees and the Swiss and Austrian Alps. And across the Atlantic, Carleton E. Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1860s and 1870s were risking their lives to capture spectacular mountain views at Yosemite.

Ranging more widely between the 1880s and 1909, and often using a telephoto lens to dramatize his studies of individual mountains, the Italian photographer Vittorio Sella (1859-1943) worked not only in the Alps but in Africa, Alaska, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, where he created a four-part panorama of Everest. In the early 1920s, significantly, 31 of Sella's photographs were presented to the American Sierra Club, where they were seen by the young Ansel Adams. He later wrote that they moved the viewer to ‘a definitely religious awe’: the same effect that his own visionary images, both views of distant ranges and pictures taken during serious climbs in the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere, would have on generations of nature enthusiasts. Enormously widely disseminated as book illustrations, calendars, and posters, Adam's mountain photographs are the most iconic examples of the entire genre.

Other influences on Adams were two Englishmen, Arthur Gardner, who wrote The Art and Sport of Alpine Photography (1927), and Frank Smythe (1900-49), who took part in three Everest expeditions and wrote 27 books during his career. Smythe was not only an accomplished photographer but shared the pantheism fundamental to Adams's vision.

While Adams famously used large- or medium-format equipment, the availability of 35 mm cameras, especially the Leica, from the mid-1920s considerably reduced the burdens that climbers had to bear and, increasingly by the Second World War, major expeditions were equipped with them. By the late 20th century, lightweight SLRs were becoming increasingly popular. Technical advances notwithstanding, however, mountain photography remains exceptionally challenging. Perched on top of Mont Blanc on 24 July 1861, Auguste Bisson could barely stop shivering long enough to make his exposures, and his team had difficulty in melting enough snow to wash the plates after development. Just over a century later, while climbing on Baffin Island, Chris Bonington (b. 1934) found the cold incredible:

The metal of the camera was so cold that if it touched my cheek as I held it to my eye I received a cold burn. As soon as I brought the eyepiece anywhere near the warmth of my body it misted and froze over, so that I could see nothing. Worst of all, though, the film was so brittle in the cold that it snapped at the least excuse. I tried to warm the camera inside my parka, but felt the heat drain out of my already chilled body, into this lump of metal, which had a temperature of around minus thirty. (Boundless Horizons: The Autobiography of Chris Bonington, 2000)

— Joanna Wright/Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Brower, D., Summit: Vittorio Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer. The Years 1879-1909 (1999).
• Washburn, B., Mountain Photography (1999).
• Smythe, F., Frank Smythe Omnibus (2001).
• Hammond, A., Ansel Adams: Divine Performance (2002)