“Frozen in Time: The Mountain Photography of Vittorio Sella” at the Estorick Foundation. Review by Andrew Graham-Dixon.
In 1882, a young Italian alpinist named Vittorio Sella wrote urgently to the English maker of photographic apparatus, the Dallmeyer Camera Company: “I beg you to undertake immediately the camera for plates 30 x 40 cm described in my letter; I beg you to make it in the best mahogany, with every care possible, as I will serve myself of it for taking views in the high Alps ... Here we have splendid weather, and I burn with impatience to start photographic excursions.”
The weather would not always be good, but Sella was not a man to be put off by the inconveniences of blizzard or avalanche. It was his ambition to create the first photographic portfolio of the high alpine reaches, and to that end he embarked on what he lightly called his “excursions” every year, without fail, from 1879 to 1895. During that time, he took more than a thousand photographs of the mountains. That is some seventy photographs a year, which might not seem much now – a modern photographer can shoot as many pictures in an hour – but Sella had to contend with a world of difficulty. His Dallmeyer camera weighed forty pounds, and each of the glass plates to be exposed added another two pounds to the load. He had jars full of collodium to coat the plates and buckets full of developing solution – pictures in those days had to be developed in situ – as well as a tent to serve as his travelling darkroom.All this had to be carried up into the mountains by the photographer and his doughty assistant, a labourer from one of the several textile mills near Turin owned...
