A pioneer's view from the top

Vittorio Sella's mountain shots set the bar high

September 26, 2010|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Vittorio Sella’s father wrote the first book in Italian about photography. Sella’s uncle founded the Italian Alpine Club. So it would seem all but genetically determined that Sella (1859-1943) should become the foremost mountaineering photographer of his time. What wasn’t determined, genetically or otherwise, was his being such a fine photographer, period.

Sella’s self-described goal was “to reproduce faithfully the atmosphere of the [mountain] panorama even more accurately than it can be seen by the eye or retained by the mind.’’ That’s no small task under any circumstances. It’s that much harder with the sheer difficulty of just getting in place to take the photographs. In that regard, being a mountaineering photographer is not unlike being a war photographer. And the task is positively Herculean when it involves, as it did for Sella, having to carry a camera-tripod combination weighing 40 pounds and employ highly fragile glass-plate negatives, each of which weighed 2 pounds.

“Heights of Observation: The Photographs of Vittorio Sella,’’ which runs at the Panopticon Gallery through Nov. 8, excitingly demonstrates how well he accomplished his goal. It’s easy to see why no less an authority than Ansel Adams praised “the mood of calmness and perfection pervading all of Sella’s photographs.’’

The images here span a quarter century. Yet the last one feels no less fresh, and excited (in Sella’s steady, unflappable way), than the first one. There’s a constant sense of discovery here — Sella’s own, as well as the viewer’s. Every time he took a picture, it feels as though it could have been the first time.

“Heights of Observation’’ has nearly 50 photographs by Sella, along with a portrait of him. As bookends, there are also several large-scale mountain images taken by the late Bradford Washburn, the legendary longtime head of the Museum of Science, Boston, and another admirer of Sella and his work.

“In the mountains, there you feel free,’’ T.S. Eliot writes in “The Waste Land.’’ This magnificent topography conveys such a sense of grandeur, liberation, exaltation — but with a capacity for oppression, too. Most of the Sella prints here are relatively small — 13 inches by 19 inches — which is just as well. They’d be oppressive otherwise.

Mountains and mountain climbing possess a romance, a magic. Names like Matterhorn and K2 (both of which Sella climbed and photographed) have a mystique to them, a kind of insane majesty. Yet majesty without precision is, visually anyway, so much bombast. There’s nothing bombastic about these images. Partly that’s owing to Sella’s splendid eye for detail. It’s also owing to our knowledge of how hard won is the privilege he earned us to see these locations.