The Man Who Photographed Mountains

Vittorio Sella's pioneering work from his 1899 and 1909 Indian expeditions revolutionised nature photography

- Sujoy Das

For many years, I had looked at books, magazines, websites and blogs, searching for photographs taken by 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 by the Italian photographer. 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.