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On this day in
1791 died Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, prolific and highly influential composer of Classical music.
1870 Alexandre Dumas, writer, died at 68
1906 Otto Preminger, American producer, director, and actor, was born
1911 Alfred Manessier French painter was born
1926 died Claude Monet, French Impressionist painter.
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Exhibition in London: Frozen in Time
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| Wednesday, August 6, 2008 |
Pioneering mountaineer and photographer Vittorio Sella (1859-1943) recorded his journeys to the mountains of four continents in a series of spectacular images described by both climbers and photographers as the greatest mountain photographs ever made. Frozen in Time is a selection of these stunning works spanning three decades; comprises some fifty of Sella’s extraordinary vintage photographs and multi-plate panoramas borrowed from the Fondazione Sella which owns the Sella Museum
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Cervino from Col d’Hérens, 26 July 1885 Sepia-toned silver gelatine print, 299 x 398 mm, from a 30 x 40 plate
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Vittorio Sella was born and died in Biella, in the northern Piedmont region of the Italian Alps, not far from the peaks of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. His father had written the first Italian-language treatise on photography in 1856 and his uncle Quintino Sella, the statesman and, briefly, Italian Minister of Finance, founded the Italian Alpine Club. When he was 23 years old, in 1882, Vittorio wrote to Dallmeyer, the English camera maker: “I beg you to undertake immediately the camera for the 30 x 40 centimetre plates described in my letter; I beg you to make it in the best mahogany, with every care possible, as I will use it for taking views in the high Alps… Here we have splendid weather, and I burn with impatience to start photographic excursions.” He used this cumbersome camera until 1893 when he took up a Ross & Co camera with 24 x 18 cm plates and also began to use two Kodak cameras for ‘instantaneous’ and stereoscopic photographs.
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Brêche de la Meije from the Duhamel pyramid, 9 August 1888 Aristotype, 284.5 x 382.5 mm, from a 30 x 40 plate
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Having undertaken such feats in the Alps as the first winter ascent of the Matterhorn in 1882 and the first winter traverse of Mont Blanc in 1888, Vittorio set out on the mountaineering and photographic adventures that were to consume him for many years. His travels took him on expeditions to the Caucasus in 1889, 1890, and 1896, to the Saint Elias range in Alaska in 1897, to Sikkim and Nepal in 1899, to the Ruwenzori in Uganda in 1906, to the Karakoram and Western Himalayas in 1909 and to Morocco in 1925. In 1935 at the age of 76 he made his final attempt to climb the Matterhorn, abandoned only because of an accident which injured one of the guides.
Sella could not have captured the grandeur of the mountains in the way he did had he not been as skilled a mountaineer as he was a photographer. Photographs of great peaks taken from valleys below foreshorten them but by climbing an opposite mountain, Sella gives a true picture of their immensity and beauty. Through Sella’s images we can appreciate and enjoy the mountains in a way that until then only other climbers could have shared. For example, when taking the pictures that make up his extraordinary Panorama of the Baltoro Glacier in the Karakoram range on the borders between Pakistan, China and India, Sella and his porters carried his heavy Ross & Co camera to 17,330 feet.
Camp V and K2 from the Savoy Glacier, 1909 Silver gelatine print, 390 x 292 mm, from a 20 x 25 flat film |
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More information
Frozen in Time |
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