The art of climbing
For nearly two centuries, rock-climbing and photography have been tightly intertwined, roped together on knife-edge arêtes, overhangs and seemingly sheer cliff faces.
Simon Carter’s stunning forthcoming collection of photographs, The Art of Climbing, illustrates the heights reached by this mutually supportive partnership. They capture breathtaking feats of strength and agility made possible by some of the world’s most extraordinary geological formations. Recreational rock-climbing began in the late 18th century as part of the development of mountaineering. The sport’s strong visual appeal was always apparent, captured famously in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
The piece anticipates many of Carter’s photographs with its placement of the human figure in a precipitous location against a background of peaks, pinnacles and swirling mist. Even before mountaineering entered its so-called Golden Age in 1854, when Alfred Wills made an ascent of the Alpine peak The Wetterhorn, developments in early photography were making it possible to capture mountain images. In 1849, the art critic and philosopher John Ruskin made what he claimed to be the “first sun portrait of the Matterhorn”, using the photographic process invented by Louis Daguerre. Another pioneer of this early form of photography, Joseph Tairraz, captured some of the earliest images of ascents of Mont Blanc in the 1880s. He founded a four-generation dynasty of photographic climbers. This family’s work illustrates the extraordinary development of climbing photography across the ages. From George Tairraz Snr’s images of gentleman in top hats and crinoline-skirted women exploring the Mer de Glace in 1910, to the younger George’s famous shot of the great French climber Gaston Rébuffat standing atop the needle-like L’aiguile du Roc (pictured).
This dizzying shot takes Friedrich’s Wanderer to new peaks of daring. And it anticipates the opening section of Carter’s book, Formations, which focuses on climbs of the 65m-high dolerite column, the Totem Pole, on Tasmania’s east coast. Both Tairraz’s and Carter’s work achieve a powerful synergy of the climber and the landscape, revealing a harmony of human and natural forms at the limits of both.
In the later 19th century, photographs became more important for climbing. They replaced engravings, woodcuts and lithographs as the visual form for presenting information about mountains and recording climbing achievements. The Alpine Journal, the publication of the world’s first climbing club founded in 1857, reproduced its first mountaineering photograph in 1865. Later it published guidance for climbing photographers in the article Notes on Photography in the High Alps. The climbers, authors and photographers George and Ashley Abraham were vital in the development of the kind of sports-climbing photography we see today.