Capturing grandeur in Vittorio Sella’s images

The great cold cleanses the air, wrote Vittorio Sella during one of his journeys across the higher Himalayas. Born in 1859, just two decades after the invention of photography, the Italian mountaineer and explorer went on to chart a career that brilliantly married art with science. Photography was still in its nascent stages of development when Sella picked it up during the last decades of the 19th century. But one would be hard-pressed to find anything rudimentary about his own images: so superbly did he use the modern form of image-making.

Even before I had the chance to immerse myself in these prints at the recent display on Sella’s subcontinental tours organised by DAG, New Delhi, what caught my attention were his discerning words on altitude and clarity. For, they instantly took me back to my childhood in the Himalayas, where coldness invariably acted as a cleansing agent for air. Along with inducing freshness, such cleansing would also deliver a clearness of vision, a sharpness and a luminosity that seemed to impregnate the entirety of Sella’s Himalayan oeuvre — from images of K2 in the north to Kanchenjunga in the north-east.

Despite researching colonial-era photography for over a decade, the Italian pioneer’s work left me stunned by its aura. This was particularly true of the imposing images of some of the world’s highest peaks, because until now, I had primarily concentrated on postcard-images from the period, which deliberately lionised settings that were domesticated. To be fair, Sella also engaged in these subjects, and produced handsome frames of buildings and people in Sikkim, Nepal and the Western Himalayas. But it was his panoramic shots, running over 2-3 metres in length, that truly brought out the terrain’s matchless appeal.

Well-versed with the alpine landscapes of Europe that he had scaled before travelling to Asia, Sella found an incomparable magnificence in the Himalayas, and declared the ‘Siniolchu’ mountain as “the most beautiful in the world”. Having grown up in a family with strong ties to climbing and photography, Sella was continually fortunate to find the right inspiration, financial backing and company for his pursuits, especially in the figures of the English alpinist Douglas Freshfield and the Duke of Abruzzi. Scholars have noted that it being the age of empire, these men were very much involved in the colonial project of cartographic domination. But as Roger Härtl, the author of ‘Photographs at Edge: Vittorio Sella and Wilfred Thesiger’, observes, Sella’s own relationship with the porters and staff of his expeditions was respectful, an amicability that rested on the photographer’s excellent organisational skills.

It was during 1899-1909 that Sella made his most famous Himalayan journeys, starting from the circumnavigation of Kanchenjunga and culminating with an expedition to K2. Even as he and his fellowmen were unable to climb the peaks, their forays assumed massive significance, given that they were among the first tours by Westerners in these sublime spaces. Beholding the images that Sella took among the gigantic glaciers and treacherous slopes, one also recalls his earlier photographs of the Alps, of which he was quite proud. And indeed, such dual referencing while perceiving new landscapes was integral to the evolving pictorial discourse of the time. But Sella was also a keen observer of the particularities inherent to the Himalayas. Charged by a contemplative spirit, he was drawn to the flora, fauna and the endlessly diverse forms of mountains themselves — an interest that wasn’t necessarily shared by his companions. He honed his individual genius through his mastery of techniques like the collodion process and the dexterous use of heavy instruments in an unhospitable geography. Quite tellingly, Sella liked positioning his staff and tents along with the summits in the background, in order to provide a true idea of spatial scale. And in their absence, he would sometimes even paint them in!

Witnessing Sella’s images, it is hard to disagree with the legendary American environmentalist and photographer Ansel Adams, who observed that there is no “fake grandeur” about them, and that their purity “moves the spectator to religious awe”. But Sella’s own self-reflexivity is even more illuminating regarding the philosophy of photography. As he stated, “The wish to reproduce faithfully the atmosphere of the panorama even more accurately than it can be seen by the eye or retained by the mind delights the photographer.”

And herein lies a fundamental creative paradox. A “faithful” reproduction of a physical landscape automatically intensifies its appeal into something “more”, so that the final effect is nothing short of “magical”. The Australian mountaineer Greg Child found Sella’s panoramas “striking” and “startling” because they were among the first pictures to portray untraversed locations in an expansive fashion, that couldn’t otherwise be viewed through ordinary human vision.

Sella’s braiding of scientific knowledge with a seemingly numinous sensibility laid strong foundations for newer explorations, while simultaneously proving useful for the production of precise modern maps. His sublime shots adeptly bring out the truth of Robert Macfarlane’s words: “By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made.” For, in portraying the greatness of space, Sella also succeeded in conveying the incredible depths of time, his work ultimately amassing a timeless quality itself.

— The writer is a historian, artist and cultural critic from Shimla