Past Exhibitions

Summit: Vittorio Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer, The Years 1879-1909

In 1882, the 23-year-old Italian mountain climber Vittorio Sella wrote to an English camera maker: "I beg you to undertake immediately the camera for the 30 x 40 centimeter 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."

From his home in the northern Piedmont, not far from the peaks of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, Vittorio Sella set out on the mountaineering and photographic adventures that were to consume him for the next several decades. 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 Africa in 1906, and to the Karakoram and Western Himalayas in 1909.

The exhibition Summit has been organized by the museum's curator, Wendy Watson, and American mountaineer Paul Kallmes. It comprises 125 of Sella's spectacular vintage photographs and multi-plate panoramas borrowed from the Fondazione Sella in Biella, Italy. Although he is well-known among the mountaineering community worldwide, Vittorio Sella slipped into obscurity in the history of photography over the past century. The last major show of his work occurred in 1893 when the Appalachian Mountain Club toured a group of photographs to 75 cities across the nation. At that time, thousands turned out to view Sella's astonishing pictures of the Alps and the Caucasus; but his major expeditions with explorers Sir Douglas Freshfield and the Duke of Abruzzi still lay ahead of him. His extraordinary images of these faraway lands and their inhabitants were used to illustrate publications documenting the important scientific surveys carried out by these adventurous pioneers.

In 1946, Ansel Adams-one of Sella's greatest admirers-wrote a memorial tribute to him in the Sierra Club Bulletin: "The memory of Vittorio Sella is closely embraced by the moods of the world's great mountains, many of which are known to us chiefly through the beautiful imagery of his lens. Mighty K2, shrouded in gray plumes of the Monsoon, the thundering avalanches of Mount St. Elias, remote Ruwenzori glittering over the hot plains of Africa, and the noble crag of Ushba towering above the ancient Caucasian lands-these are revealed in all their sheer majesty in Sella's masterful photographs."

The book accompanying the show, co-authored by Watson and Kallmes and published by Aperture, was recently awarded a prize at the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival. After leaving Mount Holyoke, the exhibition will travel to New York City and Banff, Canada.

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