Mountain Photography

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Bradford Washburn, “Mount St. Elias looking southwest over the crest of the southeast ridge of Mount Logan,” 1938

black-and-white photograph (©Bradford Washburn, courtesy of Decaneas Archive, from the Collection of Kluane National Park Visitor Centre)

For some 25 years, starting back in 1930, Bradford Washburn, the foremost American alpinist of the mid-20th century, photographed aerial vistas of soaring peaks in Alaska and Yukon to help mountaineers plan their expeditions. But beyond their practical uses, his magnificent images are also stunning works of art.

Washburn’s black-and-white photographs of Kluane National Park and surrounding areas in Yukon’s southwest are part of a two-person exhibition, Encounters with the Sublime, at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff until April 8. They are paired with photographs of the same region taken more than half a century later by one of this century’s leading international photographers, Sebastião Selgado, a Brazilian photojournalist.

The show includes 14 of Washburn’s images, part of a collection purchased by Parks Canada in 1985 to mark the 100th anniversary of Canada’s first national park. Most give a sense of hovering above the scene, sometimes looking straight down at the forbidding terrain where mountains spike and glaciers flow. The curator’s statement leaves little doubt as to their quality: “Originally serving as a way to document ascents and plot future expeditions, now they are viewed as world-class works of art.”

Washburn, who lived from 1910 to 2007, was a cartographer by training and founded the Boston Museum of Science, serving as its director for some 40 years. Along with pioneering the use of aerial photography for mountaineering expeditions, he created maps of various mountains and ranges, including Everest. The American Mountaineering Museum in Colorado bears his name.

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Sebastião Salgado, “St. Clare Creek,” 2011

black-and-white photograph (© Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas images)

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Sebastião Salgado, “Walsh Glacier over the Icefield,” 2011

black-and-white photograph (©Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas images)

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Selgado’s photographs of the same pristine wilderness typically pull viewers closer to the ground to capture distant views with dazzling perspective, and – when they appear in the frame – dramatically textured skies above jagged peaks. His 12 photographs are part of Genesis, a globe-encompassing UNESCO-sponsored project that Selgado undertook from 2004 to 2011 to create “a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature.”

Kluane National Park and Reserve, along with three other protected areas – Wrangell-St. Elias, Glacier Bay and Tatshenshini-Alsek parks – comprise a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a place deemed to have outstanding universal value. It’s the largest internationally protected area in the world at about 35,000 square miles. Home to Mt. Logan, Canada’s highest peak at 19,551 feet, the park includes the traditional territory of the Tutchone people and is managed by the Champagne and Aishihi First Nations, in cooperation with Parks Canada.

The Whyte’s selections create a spectacle at the intersection of the pictorial and the abstract. Selgado’s images capture both ruggedness and sensual essence, exemplified, for instance, by wind-shaved snow and curving glaciers. Both photographers intensify the landscape’s drama in intense and contrasting tones across the monochromatic spectrum.

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Jon Goodman, “Late Sun and Shadow, King’s Landing, Columbia Mountains,” 2015

pigment print on prepared paper (carbon print)

A companion exhibition, Passion & Purpose: Carbon Prints & Photogravures, shows work by Jon Goodman, a contemporary American photographer also compelled by mountains, but more interested in expressing emotion than in documenting nature. He says he is drawn to “experience wilderness and the elements in its basic forms … to try to photograph in the places where they intersect, moving water and stone, sky, trees and snow.”

Goodman’s photos are sumptuous with texture, shape and the play of light. They shine, almost sparkle, but also drop into dark moodiness. His production method, using dust-grain photogravure and carbon printing, is renowned for this effect. Photogravure involves printing ink from an engraved copper plate onto paper to render an intaglio print. Carbon printing uses artist pigment (primarily lamp black), gelatin, paper and chemical sensitizer to create a negative, and from that negative, a print.

It’s notoriously challenging, but Goodman loves the magical effects. “Often I wonder, and sometimes I joke, that if I knew then what I know now about the difficulties of this process I would never have pursued this work,” he says. “But in truth, that is not so. The question is not about difficulty, but about beauty. For me ink and paper carry an aura and allure that transcend all of the difficulties and frustrations of the journey.”

Goodman’s images feature stark mountain vistas in the Canadian Rockies and the Columbia Mountains. An evocative juxtaposition appears in Ski Tracks & Shadow, where evidence of human passing is traced by thin lines in what otherwise seems a barren locale.

Also included are pictures of corrugated rock formations that Goodman took in canyons along the Colorado River and images of plants, flowers and vegetables printed on buff-coloured paper to create an elegant retro look. A striking example is Lupine Bending, rendered in greys on a black background. The textures and tones evoke the look of a charcoal drawing, the contribution, obviously, of the carbon.

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Gar Lunney, “Skiers on Mt. Norquay,” 1962

black-and-white photograph (NFB Stills Division Archive, courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada / Canadian Photography Institute)

A final show, Scripted Wilderness: Photographs of Banff from the National Film Board of Canada, offers a conceptual take on archival imagery. Photographer and curator Sarah Fuller has assembled images from the NFB’s stills division, established in 1939. She chose work by staff photographer Gar Lunney of alpine landscapes, people and deer. They are grouped and framed, along with their grey catalogue cards, in seven wall pieces that foreground their role – “to produce and disseminate a scripted idea of Canadian national identity” in which landscape took a central position.

The show also includes two sets of dramatic mountain shots displayed in vitrines – five of Mount Rundle and five of visitors atop Sulphur Mountain, overlooking Banff and the Bow Valley. Fuller’s treatment foregrounds these photos not just as scenic images, but as artifacts – documents with a promotional, even propagandistic, intention, created at a significant historic moment in the development of Canada’s identity, its sense of itself. ■

Encounters with the Sublime is at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff until April 8.