In pictures: An Italian photographer’s earliest images of the majestic Himalayas

A founding Italian artist named Vittorio Sella had a significant impact on rock pictures and mountaineering history at the change of the 20th century.

His obscure Himalayas images continue to be some of the most recognizable ones always captured.

Through his glass, Vittorio Sella: Photographer in the Himalaya, a fresh continued exhibition in Delhi, depicts the breathtaking beauty of the Himalayas.

The show, which was co-curated by renowned British explorer and author Hugh Thomson and was coordinated by Delhi Art Gallery ( DAG ), is likely to be one of Sella’s largest works of Indian art.

It features some of the earliest high-altitude images of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest hills, and K2, the country’s second-tallest rock, captured over a decade ago.

Born in Biella, a town known for its wool trade in northern Italy, Sella ( 1859–1930 ) made his first ascents in the nearby Alps.

” Throughout his career Sella used the architectural and chemical abilities that his father and the wool mills had taught him,” says Thomson.

By his twenties, he had mastered difficult picture techniques like the laminating approach, enabling him to create large-format cup plates under severe conditions.

His magnificent images, crafted with complex perfection, earned international acclaim.

Sella and British navigator Douglas Freshfield went through Kanchenjunga on an mission that circumnavigated the Himalayas in 1899.

Any rock round also involved a border crossing into Nepal, which was also a finished country.

Sella seized the chance to get picturesque snow-drenched peaks while the player’s climbing ambitions were thwarted by persistent rain. He experimented uneasily with systems, trying out telephoto photos of Kanchenjunga. His photos transported visitors to a time-untouched world.

A decade after, Sella reached new heights- both literally and musically- on a 1909 mission to K2 with the Duke of the Abruzzi.

His talent and perseverance are reflected in his pictures of the world’s most challenging mountains. Carrying a camera system weighing roughly 30kg, Sella crisscrossed treacherous scenery, creating graphics that defined rock images.

Jim Curran, writer of K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain, calls Sella “possibly the greatest rock photographer… his name]is ] associated with technical beauty and aesthetic elegance”.

Sella was known for his incredible tenacity, which enabled him to travel through the Alps with remarkable speed despite carrying a lot of camera gear.

His impromptu lens harness and shoes, which are three times as heavy as those of today, are preserved at the Photographic Institute in Biella.

His clothing only weighed over 10kg, while his lens tools, including a Dallmeyer cameras, tripod, and plates, added another 30kg- more than today’s airline baggage limits.

On the K2 expedition, Sella captured around 250 formal photographs with his Ross &amp, Co camera over four to five months, on Kanchenjunga, about 200, notes Thomson.

This number is nothing extraordinary in modern digital terms, and even in the final days of analog film, it would have been equivalent to roughly eight rolls, which a 1970s photographer could have used in one morning on a single mountain, but when Sella was taking pictures, that was a lot.

Because he had a limited number of plates to shoot, it meant that a lot of care and thought went into each photograph.

Years later, the famous mountaineer-photographer Ansel Adams would write that the” purity of Sella’s interpretations move the spectator to a religious awe”.

High-altitude photography came with risks: Many of Sella’s most ambitious shots were damaged when humid weather induced tissue dividers to adhere to the negatives.

Yet those that survived reveal a masterful eye, notes Thomson.

” Sella was one of the first to recognize that mountaineers who made tracks in the snow were just as important to composition as they were to the mountaineers who made them.”

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