Photo Feature: The life and work of Vittorio Sella, a pioneer of early mountain photography

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In 1879, his young nephew Vittorio was attending a performance of a Verdi opera in the theatre to one side of the square. Emerging towards midnight, his head ringing with the music that was to be a lifelong passion, he realized the sky overhead was cloudless and that conditions would be perfect for photography the following morning. He made an impetuous decision. Dressed in full formal evening wear for the opera, he left his companion and departed immediately for the mountains, where he had set up a tent for just such an eventuality, and which was sheltering an extremely large camera. He walked through the night in his tailcoats to get there. The resulting picture from Mount Mars was one of his first outstanding panoramas and the true beginning of one of the most remarkable careers in photography.

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Vittorio Sella was born in 1859 in Biella, a well-known centre for the wool trade in Italy, into a prosperous family who had owned textile mills for centuries. His father, Guiseppe Venanzio, had written an acclaimed treatise on the production of wool and another—more germane to his son’s career—on the then new art of photography.

Sella’s background was cultured and enquiring. He grew up with a father who encouraged him to develop his own skills in photography and could support him financially to do so. Vittorio’s brother, Erminio, was also a fine photographer. Vittorio’s uncle, Quintino Sella, was not only a well-known politician at the national level but a founder of the Italian Alpine Club. He frequently took his nephew up to the mountains and encouraged him to make his first ascent when Sella was just a precocious fifteen—a prelude to his future exploits.

Vittorio took his first photographs from the clocktower of the old monastery above the family wool mills, which they had bought from the proceeds of their business. He later set up a darkroom on the roof of the nearby coach house to make contact-exposures from his plates, as he preferred natural daylight to do so.

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Throughout his career, Sella made use of his skills in engineering and chemistry that the wool-mills and his father had taught him. Just as the textile industry, he, too, was able to adapt to constantly changing technologies—from the huge Dallmeyer camera with its 30 x 40 cm plates he had ordered from London, with which he began his career, to the steadfast Ross & Co cameras after 1893, and finally to the ease of one of the first handheld Kodaks.

After the death of his father in 1876, Sella completed his schooling and national service in the Italian army, before returning to Biella to help in the family’s wool business. His passion, however, was photography, and there were other brothers to carry on the business, so he would often head to the mountains with his camera.

Sella also became well known for his numerous first winter ascents, like that of Monte Rosa; these being far harder to achieve than in the summer season. The diminutive Sella—only 5’6” in his mountaineering socks—was gaining a reputation for being extraordinarily tough. Often climbing with family and friends, he crisscrossed the Alps at bewildering speed, even with the unwieldy photographic apparatus he was carrying.

He wrote in one of his notebooks that: “[T]aking photographs in the Alps has greatly increased my love for mountains. I learn how better to appreciate their beauties… I can see fixed on paper the vision of a lost instant. I recognise scenes I had not been able to admire on the spot. And in such details I sometimes find the elements of beauty. The toil and accidents of a climb often blind our eyes to the beauty of the highest regions. Our mind cannot retain a true notion of the views we admired. We know we felt up there the strongest emotions; we remember but dimly the truth of the sights which fascinated our senses.”

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In 1889–90, aged 30, he made the first of two self-financed excursions to the Caucasus. His photographs from both the Alps and the Caucasus reveal how adept he was becoming at using the human figure to give scale to his vast landscape compositions. He also recorded the people he met and who gave him hospitality. By the end of the century, he was ready for the Himalaya. He joined the British explorer Douglas Freshfield for a circumnavigation of Kangchenjunga, the 3rd-highest peak in the world, and one that remained unclimbed until 1955.

Kangchenjunga is a great mountain not only in height but in presence, and the excited Sella responded with an exemplary set of prints, helped by the way a recent snowfall had dusted the mountains with the Himalayan equivalent of make-up. This was a superb introduction to the highest abodes of the world, as the mountain lies between India, Nepal and Tibet, so vistas opened up into every country.

By far the most important connection for Sella was his early friendship with the Duke of the Abruzzi, the grandson of the Italian king. A decade or so younger than Sella, the Duke was likewise a man of extraordinary energies with interests in exploring the Arctic as well as the mountains. In 1897, he effectively became Sella’s patron and went on to fund three important expeditions in which Sella would take part both as a mountaineer and even more importantly as the photographer of record.

He was documenting the scientific aims of the expedition in a thorough and conscientious way, one that he enhanced with his aesthetic appreciation. It could be said of Sella that he was incapable of framing a poor composition, whether it be a mountain, person or tree; and that he had the quality of facilità which was so praised in Renaissance Italy, of producing pictures which appear complete but are not overfinished—that are at ease with themselves.

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Sella’s final journey with the Duke was the most spectacular and ambitious. In 1909, they travelled to the Karakoram beyond the western Himalaya to attempt the second-highest mountain in the world, one which has since achieved a fearsome reputation—K2. Well led and organized, the expedition did not suffer some of the terrible deaths of subsequent ones and has a place in mountaineering history as one of the first attempts at climbing the most extreme peak of Asia. They managed to get as high as 19,685 ft on the ridge to the southeast (now known as the Abruzzi Ridge); the Duke himself continued even higher on to nearby Chogolisa (Bride Peak) at 24,600 ft to set a world record for altitude at the time.

Aged fifty at the time, Sella was an experienced and accomplished photographer in his prime. The images he captured on and around the virgin landscape of K2 are some of his finest. He continued to climb in Europe and photograph almost right up to his death in 1943 at the age of eighty-four.

Sella’s photographs are, in some ways, becoming as much an elegy as a celebration. Perhaps the last word should be left to [the famous mountaineer–photographer], Ansel Adams: “His was a rich and productive life, and one of the happiest as well. Few have looked upon an equal wealth of the world splendours; fewer still have enjoyed the opportunity to interpret and express them; and the period of his life encompasses the golden age of mountaineering and exploration.”

 

The author Hugh Thomson is an award-winning travel writer, filmmaker and explorer. Edited excerpt reproduced with permissions from the book Vittorio Sella: Photographer in the Himalaya, ©2025 DAG Pvt Ltd., New Delhi, a publication accompanying the DAG exhibition Vittorio Sella: Photographer in the Himalaya, on view at Bikaner House, New Delhi from 31 January till 14 February 2025.

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