From K2 to Kangchenjunga: How Vittorio Sella's pioneering work changed mountain photography forever

Mint

12 hours ago

For many years, I had looked at books, magazines, websites and blogs, searching for photographs taken by Italian Vittorio Sella. Over the course of time, these photographs became like familiar friends—and often, on seeing a mountain image on Google, I knew it was a Sella. But nothing prepared me for the enormity of the moment when I visited the exhibition, titled Vittorio Sella: Photographer in the Himalaya, which opened at Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata on 8 August.
Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), in collaboration with Victoria Memorial, is showing for the first time in India a collection of 78 Sella prints from his expeditions around Kangchenjunga in 1899 and the Karakoram in 1909.
To see the original Sella prints—some of the panoramas are over 10ft in length and meticulously stitched together—is truly a revelation. The stupendous details in the ridges, icefalls, glaciers and scree slopes in the images shot well over a hundred years ago is mindboggling to say the least.
A pioneering mountain photographer of his generation, Sella set a benchmark in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In an era when photography was mainly confined to the realms of a studio in controlled conditions and the emphasis remained on documentation, Sella took the large-format studio equipment to the lofty heights of the Himalaya and the Karakoram, creating images that went far beyond mere documentation and are valued today for their aesthetic beauty and composition.
Sella was born in the small town of Biella at the foot of the Italian Alps in 1859. The family was wealthy and his father owned a textile mill. He worked for some time in the family business before his passion for mountains and photography got the better of him. He was inspired by his uncle Quintino, who was a keen mountaineer and the founder of the Italian Alpine Club. Sella started climbing in the Alps. The story goes that one night in 1879, while attending an opera in Biella, Sella noticed a clear night sky. Dressed in his formal clothes, he rushed up the mountain to his small tent where a camera was mounted for such eventualities and took a brilliant panorama of Mont Mars.
Sella started out by using the large plate 30x40cm Dallmeyer camera that he carried with him to the field. The camera itself weighed around 40 pounds and each glass negative around 2 pounds. Along with this there was a heavy tripod to support the equipment. Sella carried much of this equipment himself as he climbed up steep mountain heights. Later as technology evolved, he switched to the smaller Ross and Co. cameras around 1893 and finally towards the end of his career, he also used one of the first hand-held Kodak cameras.
When Sella started out, it was the era of the wet collodion photo process—where the glass negatives had to be coated and developed on site, a daunting task. Later around 1880, the dry gelatine plate was introduced. It allowed photographers to leave their mobile darkrooms and work with higher exposure speeds and better sensitivity and process the plates back home. Many of Sella's later prints were the conventional silver gelatine ones. Sella was possibly one of the first photographers to include human figures in his mountain landscapes to provide a sense of scale, a technique which many modern photographers also follow today.
Sella climbed extensively in the Alps from 1880-93. Some of his notable climbs were the first winter ascent of the Matterhorn in 1882, the first winter ascent of Mont Rosa in 1884, and the first winter traverse of Mount Blanc in 1888.
He also looked further afield and made three expeditions to the Russian Caucasus in 1889, 1890 and 1896. On the first expedition, Sella and his team made an ascent of Mount Elbrus (5,642m), the highest peak in Europe. Sella photographed mountains in four continents—the Alps in Europe, Mount St Elias in North America in 1897, Ruwenzori in Africa in 1906, Kangchenjunga in Sikkim and Nepal in 1899 and K2 and the Karakoram in 1909, in Asia.
It is pertinent to point out Sella's relationship with two towering personalities: the British lawyer and explorer Douglas Freshfield, who was president of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, and the Italian nobleman, Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, who became Sella's patron.
Knowing Sella's reputation as a mountain photographer, Freshfield invited Sella and his brother Erminio on a landmark expedition around Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, in 1899. In a letter to Sella, Freshfield wrote, 'Could I hope to get you to bring your equipment and experience…but I should like to see those great peaks and go around Kangchenjunga…I have thought so for 20 years…perhaps it has got too late!"
The Kangchenjunga expedition encountered bad weather and extreme snowfall on many days. Sella was undaunted. He put his heavy tripod and 40-pound plate camera in the 3ft of snow on the Zemu glacier in North Sikkim and shot what was eventually recognised as one the finest photographs of Siniolchu (6,888m). Freshfield later described Siniolchu as 'the most superb triumph of mountain architecture and the most beautiful snow mountain in the world". The DAG exhibition has two prints of Siniolchu besides images of Kangchenjunga and other satellite peaks of the range. The expedition completed the circuit of the mountain crossing the high Jongsong La, around 6,045m, from Sikkim into Nepal in extremely difficult and snowy conditions.
Sella's three major expeditions were with the Duke of the Abruzzi, who had a passion for mountains and the desire to climb the highest peaks in the world. The duke also wanted to document his expeditions and with this in mind, he invited Sella to accompany him to Alaska, Ruwenzori and finally to the Karakoram.
In 1897, the duke along with Sella and his team summitted Mount Saint Elias in Alaska. In 1906, the duke asked Sella to accompany him to the Ruwenzori mountains in Uganda known as Mountains of the Moon. On the Uganda expedition along with the ascent of Mt Stanley, the fourth highest peak in Africa, Sella photographed the exotic vegetation, rainforests as well as the indigenous people of the region.
Sella's last major expedition was to the Karakoram in 1909, at age 50, where he produced some of his finest work, including K2, Broad Peak, the Gasherbrums, Muztagh Tower and Chogolisa, all of which can be seen at the exhibition. There are some magnificent panoramas of the range from the Baltoro glacier. The climb of Chogolisa set a new altitude record of 7,498m, which remained unbroken until the British expedition to the Everest in 1922.
Unfortunately, the duke was forced to turn around just 150m below the summit due to bad weather. Interestingly, Chogolisa remained unclimbed for 66 years until an Austrian expedition summitted the peak in 1975. Sella's photograph of the duke and his guides climbing the Chogolisa icefall with enormous seracs about to topple over their heads remains one of the classics of mountain photography.
Sella returned to Biella in 1909 after the expedition and focused his energies on selling his prints and photographs. A large collection of his work was bought by the National Geographic Society in 1912. He was also made an honorary member of the American Alpine Club in 1938. Sella continued to climb in the Italian Alps, the Grand Paradiso ranges and in 1935, at the age of 76, he made one last attempt to climb the Matterhorn but was unsuccessful. Sella died in Biella in 1943 at the age of 84.
In his memory, the Italian Alpine Club set up Rifugio Vittorio Sella, an alpine hut, in the Grand Paradiso National Park. One of the peaks in the Ruwenzori range of Africa on Mount Luigi di Savoia was also named Sella peak in his honour.
In November 2019, I trekked to the Pangpema base camp of Kangchenjunga at 5,130m in Nepal, where Sella had climbed up to a grassy shelf and shot his magnificent panorama of Kangchenjunga and the glacier. In Sella's footsteps, I struggled up a steep slope trying to reach the viewpoint. The Nepal earthquake of 2015 had reduced the hillside to a jumble of rock and scree and the going was hard. As I looked out over the glacier and the base camp below to the lofty heights of Kangchenjunga on that clear autumn morning, what was most startling was the absence of snow on the glacier. In around 120 years, the snow covered glacier below Kangchenjunga had been reduced to a wasteland of rock and rubble. In these turbulent times of extreme weather patterns, glacial lake outbursts and climate change, Sella's photographs stand as testimony as to what the great glaciers and mountains of the Himalaya and Karakoram looked like many years ago.
The legendary American landscape photographer Ansel Adams was a great admirer of Sella's work. In an article in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1946, Adams says, '…we are amazed by the mood of calmness and perfection pervading all of Sella's photographs. In Sella's photographs there is no faked grandeur; rather there is understatement, caution, and truthful purpose…Sella has brought to us not only the facts and forms of far-off splendours of the world, but the essence of experience which finds a spiritual response in the inner recesses of our mind and heart."
At Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata till 7 September, 10am-6pm. Closed on Mondays and public holidays.
Sujoy Das is a Kolkata-based trekker, mountain photographer and co-author of Everest, Reflections on the Solukhumbu.