Photographic Developments

“Given the cumbersome nature of early cameras, with their glass plates and heavy tripods, photography in the mountains only started with film and the lightweight Leica.” And the book chapter begins with the Everest pictures taken on George Mallory’s ‘vest pocket Leica’, then skips to the 60s for an interesting discussion of fashion photographer John Cleare selling pictures of his climbing pals Joe Brown and Don Whillans, in the early days of the Sunday colour supplements.

To save embarrassment, I’m not naming the book – and I’ve even gone to the length of misquoting it from memory rather than actually looking it up. Because, of course, it’s quite, quite wrong.

Okay, that’s right about the cumbersome stuff and the heavy tripod. But given climbing the Grépon, say, or Scafell Crag, is silly and difficult in the first place: yes, there were one or two silly and difficult people taking those heavy tripods and 8 x 10 inch glass plates up there as well.

And when I say one or two – I’m aware of at least five of them, with their tripods and glass plates, up there in the high mountains before anyone ever thought of the lightweight Leica.

Because when you’ve been up there on the Grépon or Scafell or Everest: why wouldn’t you want the pictures of it afterwards?

The first ‘photographers’, even before the coming of the camera, were artists and engravers. The likes of M. Gabriel Loppé, with perhaps a somewhat lighter easel but a large and awkward drawing pad, up there on Mont Blanc with his gloves on and his feet freezing, trying to capture the sunset before the water froze in his little water jug.

Or Edward Whymper, financing his assaults on the Matterhorn with his pencil and sketchbook, following up with engravings in copper or steel to hit the mass market via the Illustrated London News. His engraving of the fatal first ascent, and of the mystic fogbow and brocken spectre the survivors saw on the way down: they do seem to be made from memory and the imagination. But this one of the little tent on the Col du Lion, at the base of the Italian Ridge, looks to be authentically taken from life.

And then, when the camera did come along, Whymper was back up the Matterhorn, taking pictures of the precursor of the Hörnli Hut and so becoming the first of the glass plate guys on the high hills.1

But at almost the same time, another action photographer was at it among the Chamonix Aiguilles. Technically not the most perfect photos: but then, Miss Lily Bristow was climbing at the edge of what was possible, on only the third-ever ascent of the technically tricky Grépon.2

Lily Bristow, ace climber of the 1890s

·

April 2, 2025

Mountaineering, as invented by 19th-century English gentlemen, was such a weird sport that, just sometimes, some of the normal social rules didn’t apply. Right from the start, the upper-middle-class barristers and academics were climbing alongside, and forming lifelong friendships with, peasant farmers from the Cantons of Switzerland. But of course, wom…

Full frame glass-plate photography: that size eight-inch-by-ten is the glass plate itself, which is a whole lot bigger than your 35mm film. Given a suitably rock-solid tripod, and scrupulous attention to eliminating stray light, and the skill to compose a photo while looking at it upside down and very faint with your head under a black hood- cloth: all this while at the same time perching on a pinnacle or clinging to some rocks: impossible, of course, to produce anything worth looking at under those conditions. Well, it is unless your name happens to be Abraham… Almost a century before John Cleare, and with equipment weighing about ten times as much, they were dangling from ropes while photographing early climbs on Great Gable and even Scafell Crag.

They didn’t know how to spell Scafell: but they could certainly take a picture of it.

And finally, two years before that vest-pocket Leica, the last person to take glass-plate pictures on mountains on the basis that glass plates was what there was to take pictures with: George Mallory himself. Not that he was a serious photographer: the first pictures he took he had the glass plate in the wrong way around, so those ones never even happened. And okay, the mules and the yaks carried the heavy tripod for most of the march in from Darjeeling.

Still, Mallory himeself had to haul the kit up to around 20,000 feet to take the picture s of Everest from high above the Rongbuk Glacier.

Three years later, the advent of the Vest Pocket Leica put an end to all that glass-plate action and made mountain photography possible when previously it really wasn’t.

But still, some of them were up there and at it anyway.

Leave a comment

Share

More about MOUNTAINEERING