In 1899, the Italian mountaineer and photographer Vittorio Sella took part in an expedition to the Kangchenjunga led by the British mountaineer and explorer Douglas Freshfield and funded by Luigi Amedeo, the Duke of Abruzzo. A long-time collaborator of both Freshfield and the Duke, Sella was already well-known for his large-format 30 cm x 40 cm photographs and winter ascents of the Alps and Caucasus ranges in Europe. Although the expedition failed to summit due to heavy snowfall, Sella seized the opportunity to create portraits of the peak dusted by pristine snow — images that would later become the objects of legendary American landscape photographer Ansel Adams' admiration.

"The purity of Sella's interpretations move the spectator to a religious awe," Adams wrote in an article titled 'Vittorio Sella: His Photography' in the Sierra Club Bulletin 31, no. 7, in December 1946.

Born in 1859 to an influential family of politicians and mountaineers (his uncle Quintino Sella was a founding member of the Italian Alpine Club), Vittorio Sella became famous for his photographs and winter ascents of the high Alps in the 1880s. He was only 19 years old when he made his first attempt at mountain photography, going to summit on the 2600-metre Mount Mars, which overlooks his hometown Biella in northern Italy.

Using borrowed equipment, Sella made his first 'Panorama of the Alps' during this climb, using the complicated, cumbersome wet plate collodion process, which requires the photographic surface (usually a glass plate) to be coated, sensitised, exposed, and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, using a portable darkroom in the field.

These technological limitations did not deter Sella. In 1882, the same year he led the first rope party to summit the Matterhorn in winter, Sella wrote to the London firm J.H. Dallmeyer, asking them to modify a large-format camera with 30 cm x 40 cm plates so that he could carry it more easily in the Alps. Sella preferred to use this larger, heavier camera over the smaller and more portable 24 x 30 format.

Between 1899 and 1909, Sella took part in two expeditions to the Himalayas and made several iconic panoramas and portraits of the majestic Kangchenjunga and K2 peaks. The 1909 expedition to K2 was the culmination of Sella's career — both as a mountaineer and photographer — and led to the making of several outstanding images of the range. These images are currently on view at Bikaner House in New Delhi till February 14, 2025, as part of 'Vittorio Sella: Photographer In The Himalaya', an exhibition of Sella's photographs of the Himalayas curated by British filmmaker, explorer, and writer Hugh Thomson in collaboration with DAG.

I saw the exhibition while I was in New Delhi to attend the opening preview of Indigenous Fashion Futures, an IAF parallel exhibition focusing on India's indigenous textile traditions. I was mesmerised by the breathtaking beauty of Sella's images of the Himalayas. But as magnificent and heroic as the images are, they also made me think about another aspect of Sella's photographs: his Western male gaze.

For too long, stories about the Himalayas have been told by the tough, strong, resilient, white male explorer-adventurer — the Westerner who scales and summits great peaks in foreign, unexplored, "exotic" lands. More than the mountains, these stories champion the Western Man and his pursuit of individual excellence and achievements. Sella's images, however iconic and significant, are not entirely devoid of this Western male gaze. Although these images capture the essence and the majesty of these mighty mountains, they also mark the Himalayas as an object and instrument of the Western pursuit of individualistic achievement.

More than any other place on earth, the Himalayas have served as a kind of blank slate upon which the Western world has projected its fantasies and ambitions. Lured by the romantic idea of summiting its great, once-insurmountable peaks, charting its rivers, and encountering novel religious and spiritual practices, many European explorers flocked to the region during the colonial era and beyond. Even Sella could not escape the region's siren-like call. Isn't it time we centred the voices of the region's indigenous peoples instead?

Vittorio Sella: Photographer In The Himalaya, curated by British filmmaker, explorer, and writer Hugh Thomson in collaboration with DAG, is on view at the Bikaner House, New Delhi, till February 14, 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.

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