Kangchenjunga in 1899 was a complicated destination at the time. The British were in dispute with Tibet about what they perceived as undue Russian influence in Lhasa and were determined to force open trade routes. The natural route was through Sikkim, so any British reconnaissance expedition there was likely to be viewed with mistrust by the Tibetans. Douglas Freshfield, the leader of the expedition, was a supporter of the British position and of Sir Francis Younghusband, who later led the punitive raid on Tibet in 1904. Moreover, any circumnavigation of the mountain involved an incursion into Nepal, which was also a closed kingdom. It was all still relatively uncharted and certainly unphotographed, so it was a genuinely exploratory expedition in which they frequently got lost – or at least were unsure which pass led where – so life cannot have been easy for the official photographer.
Some of Vittorio Sella’s plates were, therefore, understandably more of geographical record than of aesthetic interest. But others are of a startling quality, like those of Siniolchun [image 1]; or give a sense of the vastness of the landscape, with the porters who proceed ahead of the camera providing a sense of scale [banner image]. He also used the expedition’s tents to give scale. The approach march from Darjeeling [images 2, 3 and 4] led the expedition through the lush forests of the southern Himalaya, and Sella took some fine photographs, including one of his brother Erminio as he crossed a rope bridge [image 6], with its strong diagonals showing Sella’s flair for composition; and of some flowers that appealed to him because they reminded him of the gentians of the Alps.
Once they reached the massif, a snowstorm left five-foot drifts to wade through, but it proved providential for Sella, as the peaks were attractively covered in snow. When off on his own photographing them, his iron constitution suffered an unusual indisposition, to the alarm of the group who received a message saying he was ill and required assistance. But on rejoining them, he put this down to a monotonous diet of cold, boiled yak rather than altitude – anyone who has eaten too many yak momos may sympathise.
They had gone to Kangchenjunga in the August-October window before winter and, as often happens in the Himalaya, winter came early, so they retreated to Darjeeling, after an expedition that had been more successful for its photography than mountain climbing. However, they managed the circumnavigation in a way many subsequent expeditions failed to achieve.
When George Band – one of the climbing pair who first summitted Kangchenjunga in 1955 – tried the same circumnavigation as Freshfield a century later, in the late 1990s, he told me he had beaten back by the same daunting political geography. Sella’s photographs were given considerable circulation by the popularity of Freshfield’s book, Round Kanchenjunga, a lively and well-written account that became deservedly popular, even if it betrayed a certain amount of the colonial jingoism of the day.
The expedition to K2 in 1909 was for Sella in every sense the pinnacle of his career, both in mountaineering and photography. It was his third and final exploratory journey with the Duke of the Abruzzi.
By now the Duke and Sella had a well-established working relationship, although not without the odd argument. Sella admired the Duke’s toughness – his superb constitution (“la sua salute è eccellente”) – which seemed to resist both altitude and stomach sickness, the twin enemies in the Himalaya – but sometimes deplored the way his enthusiasm would take him off on reconnaissance trips that Sella felt should have been left to the guides. There is also a thread of complaint in Sella’s journals (written in notebooks with beautiful Florentine marbled endpapers) about the way in which the Duke – perhaps understandably – sometimes prioritised the needs of the expedition over those of photography.
Sella grumbles in letters to his wife that while he wants to contemplate their surroundings, not just to assess the best place for a photograph but also to appreciate them, “other members of his team”, ie., the Duke, were all too keen to hurry on. Nor were they interested in the ibex or partridge that so fascinated him.
Unlike his outward going brother Erminio who also accompanied the expedition – and was the sort of extrovert adventurer who had gone off on the Klondike Gold Rush and been shipwrecked in the process – Sella was quieter and more reflective.
“I enjoy the solitude which so matches my feelings,” he recorded on arriving at the Baltoro Glacier and the K2 area, still almost virgin territory for western mountaineers; just the approach march had taken three weeks, as they had to cross Baltistan from Kashmir.
Some of the images that revealed themselves – like the iconic Mustagh Tower or the wave effects on the Baltoro Glacier, where the “purissimi” ice had been spun into sails – were a photographer’s dream, and Sella needed the accompanying porters to try to give some sort of human scale to the vast panoramas that unfolded before him. “The great cold cleanses the air,” he wrote. His only real anxiety, on what he may have sensed was to be his last major Himalayan expedition as he turned fifty, was whether he would be able to do justice to what he saw. Whether he would be able to fit it all into the lens, in the brief window of spring before the monsoon set in and they would have to descend.
He was still experimenting restlessly with technology. He had tried out telephoto pictures on Kangchenjunga , with a shot of the distant Everest range and the powerful picture of Siniolchun [cat. no. 41] where the mountain seems to strain every muscle and nerve towards the viewer, like a boxer coming into the ring. He took five more on K2, each a classic. Sella also used a lighter Kodak camera for more casual pictures around camp of the porters and people they met on the approach march; these were used by the Duke in his book and give a charming context to the more formal business of exploration. One imagines Sella, like a runner who has trained with a heavy rucksack, would have enjoyed the freedom of their use. He even shot a short movie on 35mm silver nitrate, a highly combustible format that would have demanded even more care in the transportation.
How fitting that one of the mountain saddles on the K2 massif should have been euphoniously named after him (for “sella” means saddle in Italian) as Sella Vittorio Sella, close to Windy Gap, from where he took what he considered to be his finest panorama; the one he had been searching for around K2. A print of it now dominates the main room of his old house, along with glass plates of landscapes that are set against the windows so that the light shines through them.
This is a lightly edited excerpt of an essay from the book Vittorio Sella: Photographer in the Himalaya, for the eponymous DAG exhibition which is on display at Bikaner House, New Delhi till February 14.
