Vittorio Sella

Vittorio Sella (1859-1943) was a pioneer who transformed mountain photography and left behind some of the most iconic images of the Himalayas.

Born into a cultured family in the northern Italian town of Biella, Sella made his first ascents in the nearby Alps. By his twenties, Sella had mastered arduous techniques like the collodion process, allowing him to develop large format glass plates in the field under punishing conditions. His multi-plate panoramas achieved unprecedented clarity and emotional resonance, and he began to attract worldwide respect from institutions like the Alpine Club. He attached great importance to aesthetics and regretted that the beauty of the mountain landscape left most mountaineers of his time indifferent. Sella displayed photographs from his expeditions at several national and international exhibitions and received numerous prizes and acknowledgements between 1884 and 1923. His photographs of mountains, previously unrecorded, hence have both a historical and an artistic significance.

Sella's introduction to the Himalayan realm came in 1899 when he accompanied British explorer Douglas Freshfield's expedition circumnavigating Kangchenjunga. Though their summit ambitions were thwarted by heavy snowfall, Sella seized the opportunity to create portraits of the peaks dusted by pristine powder snow – earning the later admiration of Ansel Adams, who would write that ‘the purity of Sella's interpretations move the spectator to a religious awe.’

The most pivotal and fruitful partnership of Sella's pioneering career was his friendship with the Duke of Abruzzi. Their expedition to K2 in 1909 was the culmination of Sella’s career, and again produced some outstanding images.

The exhibition Vittorio Sella: Mountaineer & Photographer presents a collection of photographs of landscapes and panoramic views of the Sikkim Himalayas and Karakoram taken by the Italian photographer at the turn of the twentieth century. The selection of the photographs for the exhibition and their annotations have been made by the distinguished British author and explorer, Hugh Thomson who has previously written Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary (2004).