Reappraising the Abraham brothers (2)

Continued: they took mountain photography to a new level - but was it Art?

Their mentor's death did little to deter the Abraham brothers. Picking up where Owen Glynne Jones had left off, they published a climbing guidebook for North Wales in 1906. George developed into a strong leader in his own right, making first ascents in the Lakes and Scotland. 

The Pinnacle on Scafell.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

The guidebook also helped to launch George on his prolific career of mountain writing. And both brothers became family men and pillars of the local community: Ashley was first a member and then chairman of Keswick Council.

Climbing the Eiger: original caption reads "A safe pull".
Image from George D Abraham, Swiss Mountain Climbs.

They also continued their tradition of summer mountaineering holidays in the Alps, proving that they could wield a camera as stylishly in the big mountains as on their local crags. 

Climbing the Wetterhorn.
Image from George D Abraham, Swiss Mountain Climbs.

Although it's hard to believe that they used an Instanto to capture pictures like the crevasse mishap below – surely, by this time, they’d kitted themselves out with the kind of lighter, handier apparatus that the hard-driving Mrs Main had already adopted for en-route photography. But again the record remains silent on this point.

"Hold tight! A sudden slip into a snow-masked crevasse on the Jungfrau."
        Original caption and photo from First Steps to Climbing.

They certainly explored other photographic innovations. Like Mrs Main, they experimented with film-making before the First World War and in 1921 they helped to make a feature film based on a story written by the mountaineer/novelist A E W Mason – although here the brothers served as stand-ins for the actors during climbing scenes, not as cameramen.

Image from Ashley Abraham, Beautiful Lakeland (1912).

Meanwhile, Ashley had parlayed his mountain photography skills into a series of books celebrating the broader landscapes of the Lake District and North Wales. His command of lighting and composition invites comparison with the likes of Albert Steiner (1877–1965), whose moody exposures captured the dream-like light of Switzerland’s Engadine valley.

Image from Ashley Abraham, Beautiful Lakeland (1912).

Albert Steiner is an intriguing parallel here. For decades after his death, nobody in the fine art world took him seriously. After all, the Swiss photographer had started out as a baker’s son and apprentice and for most of his career he’d made his living as a commercial photographer, producing images of hotel rooms, post buses and whatever else his clients needed for brochures and advertising copy. It was only after a landmark exhibition of his landscapes in 1992, at the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, Switzerland, that the art world started to take him seriously.

View of the Cuillins from Sligachan, Skye.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

All this raises the question whether George and Ashley Abraham aren’t also overdue for a “Kunsthaus moment”. Back then, Mills & Boon hardly did their pictures justice. Shoehorned as sketchily printed plates into one of the romance publisher’s duodecimo editions, their photos have scant room to breathe. But what if the best of their images were digitally remastered, lavishly printed on fine paper, framed, and exhibited as artworks? Then we’d see something like a Steiner-esque transformation, I suspect.

If it does happen, please enjoy the exhibition. And remember you read it here first…

References

George D. Abraham, First Steps to Climbing, Mills & Boon, Limited, London, 1923.

Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags: a portfolio of early rock climbing photographs by the Abraham Brothers, Heinemann 1975.

Iso Camartin, Peter Herzog and Ruth Herzog, «Du grosses stilles Leuchten»: Albert Steiner und die Bündner Landschaftsphotographie, Zürich, Offizin, 1992.

Reappraising the Abraham brothers (1)

They took mountain photography to another level – but was it Art? 

Back in March, I dropped into Jimbōchō, Tokyo’s used book district, on the first day of its annual festival. This yielded a musty copy of George D Abraham’s First Steps to Climbing, published in 1923 by Mills & Boon, Limited. Yes, that Mills & Boon – the back papers advertise the kind of titles that the publisher is still best known for, such as Miss Pretty in the Wood, Elizabeth Who Wouldn't, and Love and Chiffon…

The Abraham brothers, Ashley and George, in the 1930s.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

We digress. To share George Abraham’s quirky yet often pertinent climbing advice, this blog then posted a series of excerpts from his book, with the accompanying photos. Which prompted reader Stephen50 to put up some perceptive comments highlighting both the quality of the Abraham brothers’ photography and the existence of a biography, Camera on the Crags by Alan Hankinson.

Climbers in Easter Gully on Dow Crag (detail).
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

Intrigued, I reached for a copy of this genial and informative book, which explained just why the Abrahams were such skilled image-makers. For George (1871–1965) and his brother Ashley (1876–1951) were professionals, both born and bred. Their father, George Perry Abraham (1844–1923), founded and owned a successful photography business in Keswick, in the English Lake District – a business that, in turn, passed to Ashley’s son.

On Tryfan's Central Buttress.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

So they had already inherited their photographic smarts by the early 1890s, when they set about learning to rock-climb. This they did on their own bat, which probably explains why George Abraham opined in First Steps that “For a party of beginners the most effective plan, and that which really produces the best climbers, is to tackle the rocks unaided and rely on their own initiative” – a view not widely endorsed today.

Owen Glynne Jones climbing on gritstone.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

But what lofted the brothers into the big league of mountain photography was their partnership with Owen Glynne Jones (1867–1899). By profession a physics teacher in London, Jones was then at the forefront of the rock-climbing scene. A fluent writer, he was working on a climber’s guide to the Lake District, but needed somebody to make the photographs. In the Abraham brothers, he found just the team he was looking for. 

Alpinists on the way to the Fiescherhorn, Bernese Oberland.
Image from George D Abraham, Swiss Mountain Climbs.

From early 1897, for a brief two years, the brothers climbed with Jones in both the Lake District and North Wales. During that time, the brothers also went to the Alps for the first time, although not with Jones. They even talked with him about an expedition to Kanchenjunga. George Abraham advanced his climbing skills and made friends within the climbing community, while it was Ashley who more often than not tended the camera on narrow ledges.

An Underwood "Instanto".
Image by courtesy of antiquewoodcameras.com.

And what a camera! Manufactured by E & T Underwood of 130–2 Granville Street, Birmingham, the “Instanto” was little more than a mahogany frame supporting a leather bellows that could be racked in and out for focus. Shutter? Forget it: after propping the camera on a sturdy tripod, focusing onto a ground glass screen and inserting a dry plate, the photographer removed and replaced the lens cap for an estimated exposure time of, say, a second or more. By today’s norms, the name “Instanto” extravagantly violated any law of trade descriptions.

Climbers on Napes Needle (also styled the Aiguille du Nuque).
Image from Alan Hankinson's Camera on the Crags.

Yet, when viewed in the generously sized plates of Alan Hankinson’s book, the results speak for themselves. The compositions breathe a sense of classical repose, enforced by those lengthy exposure times that froze the climbers by necessity into statuesque poses. But this was only a part of it. 

On the Cuillin Ridge, Skye.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

A typical Abrahams photo never fails to bring out the shadow detail, revealing the texture and detail of the rocks in an opulent, luminous granularity. This they achieved partly from their attention to lighting – diffuse, if possible, and ideally from a three-quarter angle, over the photographer’s shoulder. But development times and tricks must also have played a role. Unfortunately, these are lost to history: the brothers wrote little or nothing about their photographic techniques. 

The Cioch, Skye.
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

On a good day, the Abrahams could give even photographic masters such as Georges Tairraz of Chamonix (1868–1924) a run for their money – like themselves, Tairraz represented the second generation of a photographic dynasty. Although any recognition for their skills from that direction was distinctly back-handed. Several of their photos, records George in First Steps to Climbing,  “appeared surreptitiously in Alpine centres with French titles, as though they portrayed bits on the Chamonix aiguilles. The Napes Needle was unmistakable, even titled as the Aiguille du Nuque…” 

On Pillar East Face (detail).
Image from Alan Hankinson, Camera on the Crags.

Alas, the Abraham brothers' rock-climbing apprenticeship with O G Jones was all too short. In August 1899, their mentor fell to his death along with his three guides from the Ferpècle Arête of the Dent Blanche. The accident horrified the climbing world, even leaving its mark on a famous Japanese novel....

(Continued)

Tales of past and present (7)

Concluded: a talk about foreign explorers of Japan's mountains, then and now.

So what is going on now? A big difference today is the internet and social media – this may reduce the need for clubs, because you can find partners and get all the information about hiking and climbing conditions online, via Yamap and Yamareco. Anyway, I'm not aware of any international hiking and mountaineering club like the Mountain Goats of Kobe at the moment.

Foreigners are still climbing technical routes in Japan, perhaps more than ever now that guiding services exist. One key source of information is a website run by Tony Grant (right), who works for the British Council. He learned to rock climb in the UK, and followed that up with alpine climbing in Poland. When he came to Japan – this was nearly two decades ago – he started climbing with other expatriates, but then started investigating Japanese climbing guidebooks.

In the end, he started publishing his own route descriptions on Climb Japan!, his English-language website, and he has published two ebooks with a selection of classic routes – including Yari’s Kitakama One, Chūōryō and Nanryō in Tanigawa-dake’s Ichinokura-sawa, Shirouma Shuryō, and other favourites.

Another big change since the 1990s is the Nihon Hyakumeizan boom among foreign climbers. For many, the first inspiration came from Lonely Planet’s Hiking in Japan, published in 2001, which had a text box describing the Hyakumeizan concept – one of the authors was Craig McLachlan, a New Zealander who climbed all 100 mountains in the summer of 1997 and published a book about this feat.

The Lonely Planet Guide is long out of print, but that doesn’t matter. Thanks to blogging – in Japanese, English and German and probably other languages too – there is a wealth of information online. One of the first such websites on the scene was Wes Lang’s Hiking in Japan, which has all the information you need for each of the 100 mountains. And you'll find more excellent guidance in the links in this blog's sidebar, including David Lowe's Ridgeline Images, Emma Goto's hiking blog, Willie Banff's On Higher Ground, and Ben Hentschel's Meizan Memories.

Wes Lang tops out on his 100th mountain in 2008.

Wes teaches English writing at two universities in the Kansai – he lives on Ikoma-yama, of course, one of the highest places in the region – and he completed his round of the Hyakumeizan in 2008, the first American to do so. So his website is a key resource for Hyakumeizan hunters who don’t read Japanese.

But that wasn’t enough for Wes – feeling that there was a gap after the Lonely Planet guide went out of print, he teamed up with an English friend, Tom Fay, and compiled a detailed guide to hiking in the Japan Alps, North, South and Central. The book also covers the four main routes on Mt Fuji. It came out in 2019 and is now the only current guidebook in English to Japan’s high mountains.

As we have seen, guidebooks can be influential. The one by Satow and Hawes set Walter Weston on his way, while Lonely Planet fomented a mini-Hyakumeizan boom among foreigners. (By the way, some foreign mountaineers are already pursuing the 200 and 300 famous mountains). It’s too early to say what influence Fay and Lang will have, but please watch this space. Something will happen for sure. 

And this brings us to the future.

Some parts of the future won't look so different from the past, I would imagine. Earlier, I mentioned the foreign botanists who travelled the mountains in the Meiji era. Well, they still do.

For example, there is a very rare birch tree found only in the Chichibu mountains and nowhere else in the world. I read that botanists at Oxford University and Tokyo University are working together to preserve it – the seeds are being kept at several different places, including Kew Gardens in London – the very same institution where your founder member Takeda Hisayoshi came to study from 1910 onwards.

Then again, mountaineering is always being re-imagined. “Mais des rêves, il en faut toujours. Je les préfère aux souvenirs,” said Gaston Rébuffat (1921–1985)( But dreams we must have and, all the time, I prefer dreams to memories).

You could spend a lifetime climbing Japan’s classic routes and the Hyakumeizan. And, for most of us, that’s more than enough. At the same time, a few pioneers now and again dream up a completely new way to read the landscape. I’m thinking here of Tanaka Yōki, who completed the Hyakumeizan with “human power” only. Or Shimizu Tetsuya, who soloed all the Kurobe gorges and made a winter traverse of the Shiretoko Peninsula.

It will be interesting to see how foreign climbers too choose to exert their imaginations in the mountains of Japan….

References

A Japanese-language version of this talk was given at the Ryokusōkai on 29 March 2025 at the offices of the Japanese Alpine Club. It drew on the following sources, among others:

Freshfield, Douglas, “A Playground at the East End: Rambles in Japan”, Alpine Journal, 1914.

Ion, Hamish, “Mountaineering in Japan: British Pioneers and the Pre-war Japanese Alpine Club” in Hugh Cortazzi (ed), Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits, Vol IX, Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

Kuwada, Gonpei, Biography of Benjamin Smith Lyman, Tokyo: Sanseidō, January 1937.

Mizuno, Tsutomu, “Meiji shoki no Nihon ni okeru gaikokujin no tozan katsudo ni tsuite”, JAC Yama, 1976 (series).

Murray Walton, W. H., Scrambles in Japan and Formosa, Edward Arnold, 1934.

New York Times, "Saving a Rare Tree Worlds Away", 26 October 2015.

Nunokawa Kin’ichi, “Nihon no yama to gaikokujin” in Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka, Taiyo Bessatsu, no 103, Autumn 1998.

Nunokawa Kin’ichi (ed), Me de miru Nihon no tozanshi, Yama to keikoku-sha, November 2005.

Starr, Frederick, Fujiyama: the Sacred Mountain of Japan, Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1924.

Weston, Walter, The Playground of the Far East, John Murray, 1918.

And many thanks for a great deal of invaluable advice and guidance from Ohmori Hisao (Japanese Alpine Club), Iain Williams (Toyohashi Alpine Club), Wes Lang and Harumi Hood (Fukui Alpine Club).

Images and ink (55)

Image: Frontispiece from Upon that Mountain (1943) by Eric Shipton.

Ink: Eric Shipton's thoughts on "Large Expeditions" particularly those of the 1930s to Everest, from Chapter Eight of Upon that Mountain. 

Finally, the disadvantage of large expeditions lay in the fact that the necessity of raising big funds made it difficult to control publicity. The expeditions became invested with a glamour foreign to the fundamental simplicity of the game. It was quite natural that mountaineers should wish to climb the highest peak in the world, or at least be interested in the project. But unfortunately Everest’s supremacy among mountains appealed to the popular imagination of a record-breaking age, and gradually the expeditions began to receive a press publicity out of all proportion to the value of the undertaking, and certainly out of keeping with what used to be regarded as "the best traditions of mountaineering”…

I knew a man with a strong claim for a place on the expedition who said that he wanted to climb Everest so as to make a big name for himself, which would enable him to use his influence in the cause of world peace. A worthy ambition, no doubt, but surely it would have been more profitable to devote his energies to the study of political economy rather than to proving himself a mountaineer with an exceptionally large lung capacity or whatever it is that enables a man to climb to great altitudes. This is one example among many of an extraordinary distortion of values which has its roots in the opening of a short-cut to fame. Were it not so laughable it might well be resented by those who find in mountaineering a deep aesthetic pleasure.

Tales of past and present (6)

Continued: a talk about foreign explorers of Japan's mountains, then and now.

As remarked in the previous post, it took a long time for foreigners to recover their enthusiasm for the Japanese mountains. When they did, new highways and Shinkansen routes may have played a part: in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Japan Alps started to come within the regular weekend range of big city dwellers for the first time.

Paul Hunt atop Shiomi-dake (3,046.9 metres).
Illustration from Paul Hunt's Hiking in Japan.

In 1988, at long last, a new English-language guidebook came out. This was Paul Hunt’s Hiking in Japan. Hunt was well qualified to write on the mountains, having graduated in geology and later working as a meteorologist. He came to Japan in 1978 to work with a team exploring for oil in the Japan Sea (following in the prospecting footsteps of Benjamin Smith Lyman). In the introduction to his book, Hunt mentions several mountain-related associations including the JAC, the Friends of the Earth, and the International Adventure Club.

The guidebook that launched a thousand mountain trips ...

The International Adventure Club, Hunt says, is "a group of foreigners and Japanese who organize hiking, rock climbing, and skiing trips out of Tokyo. They have monthly meetings in Tokyo and issue a newsletter. They can be contacted through Dave Parry or Yuko Nakano…."

In Early Heisei or thereabouts, in the early 1990s, a number of foreign climbers must have phoned Dave or Yuko – indeed, I was one of them. This small group had a smattering of experience in the European Alps and we wanted to try out some routes in the Japan Alps – somehow we had got to hear about Takidani and Kita-dake Buttress. In my case, it was a photo in Nihon Tozan Taikei, volume 7, that set me going …

Alpine Workman (and civil servant) inspects the Dome in Takidani.

The next step was suggested by a Japanese friend who had recently joined us. His idea was for our alpine group to join the Japan Workers’ Alpine Federation (Rōsan, or the Nihon Kinrōsha Sangakurenmei). This we did, in early 1992, becoming one of about 70 clubs in the Shinjuku bloc, and after that we called ourselves – or at least I did – the Alpine Workmen.

Alpine Workman (and industrial engineer) on Tsurugi-dake, Genjiro Ridge.

From that time onwards, our club calendar was probably little different from any other Rōsan club: November: winter skills refreshment climb on Mt Fuji; from January, yama-skiing, March: snow training at Tanigawa-dake, perhaps with a climb of Kuro-one; Golden Week: gasshuku on skis, eg Tsurugi-dake, Genjirō-one; June, rock-climbing and sawa-nobori, August; alpine climbing gasshuku, perhaps on Tsurugi D-Face … and so on.

Alpine Workmen taking liquid refreshment in Akagi-sawa.

A sociologist might have had an interesting time with us. Our founder president was rising up the ranks of a well-known machinery maker, our secretary helped to run an American bank’s credit card scheme, while other members worked for MITI, universities, a law firm, an international food company, an oil company, and so on. As of mid-1995, the membership roll listed ten Japanese, two Brits, three Americans, two Canadians, two Kiwis and one German. At different times, we also had Australian, Danish and Dutch members.

But nationalities were much less important than specialisms. If you wanted to prospect a big river gorge, then Sawa Control was your man. If snowholes, then it was Matsuo the Setsudo Sensei. If big walls, young Ken or Allan, and so on. If there was one common theme, it might just be that most of us originated in the inaka (Shikoku, Oxfordshire, Christchurch etc). But even that wasn’t true for everybody – one of us came from New York, and her father had helped to build the Apollo Lunar Module at Grumman Aerospace. 

I used to think of us as being part of the “present”. Of course, that can’t hold any longer. Although the IAC itself has successor organisations in both the Kanto and Kansai, our own alpine association ceased to exist decades ago. So we are in every sense history, just like the Mountain Goats of Kobe, about whom we knew nothing at that time. 

So what is going on right now?

(Continued)

Images and ink (54)

Image: Everest in winter, by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

Ink: The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann, translated by H T Lowe-Porter.

One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. … The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist — superterrestrial, Valhallan, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible — and afforded Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man’s importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own.

Tales of past and present (5)

Continued: a talk about foreign explorers of Japan's mountains, then and now.

The Great Tokyo Earthquake marked a kind of boundary in history. It’s difficult to generalise what effect it had on mountaineers, Japanese or foreign. That said, it’s hard to find any full-length book written by a foreign mountaineer in Japan after 1923, at least in English.

Murray Walton (centre) with companion and guide at Yarisawa.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.

The prominent exception is Scrambles in Japan and Formosa published in 1934 by W. H. Murray Walton (b. 1890). Murray Walton climbed Niitaka-yama on Taiwan, the “new highest mountain” in the Japanese Empire, traversed the Southern Japan Alps from end to end, and made climbs in the Central and Northern Alps too. 

Daihasenzan, a mountain of Taiwan.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.

Like his acquaintance Walter Weston,  Murray Walton was a missionary and was fascinated by the Ontake religion, visiting the mountain three times. He knew and climbed with several prominent MGK members (for example, the Reverend W H Elwin, and the American diplomat Eugene Dooman) but doesn’t mention the club in his book. On the other hand, he was a proud member of the JAC for at least 15 years.

A seance on Ontake.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa. 

After Murray Walton, foreign climbers in Japan go very quiet. Was that due to the earthquake or Japan’s growing international isolation? Or did foreigners simply stop writing books? It seems that the drop in activity was real. Kojima Usui, who wrote the foreword to Murray Walton’s book, says this: “In recent years there have been, however, fewer foreign residents interested in mountaineering. Their enthusiasm too seems to be decreasing.”

One possible explanation comes from the scholar-diplomat Edwin Reischauer, who as the son of missionaries, was brought up in Japan. As he recalls in My Life Between Japan and America:

During the 1930s, when the police were becoming increasingly suspicious of all foreigners as potential spies and one was constantly subjected to police interrogation while traveling, my birth in Japan served as a form of passport. A policeman, after dutifully questioning my identity, what I was doing, and where I was going, all of which was already recorded in his notebook, would then frequently ask me about my attitude toward the Japanese government or the current aggression Japan was engaged in on the continent. 

Indeed, the enthusiasm of foreign mountaineers took a long time to rekindle. In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan saw an enormous resurgence of hiking and alpinism, especially after the first ascent of Manaslu in May 1956.

May 9, 1956: first ascent of Manaslu by a JAC expedition.

But where were the foreigners during this so-called Manaslu boom? In English, at least, I can’t find much writing about the Japanese mountains during these decades. 

Well-thumbed copy of the JNTO guide, with a roughly contemporaneous carabiner.

And there was certainly no up-to-date guidebook to Japan’s mountains for foreigners, although the official Japan National Tourist Office guide did its best to include mountain-related advice. My copy, dated February 1975, recommends the Ochūdo-meguri on Mt Fuji as “a delightful summer excursion”. I hope that bit has been updated in more recent editions, or somebody is in for a shock.

A first sign of renewed foreign interest in Japan’s mountains came from Oscar Benl (1914–86), a professor of Japanese literature, who translated Inoue Yasushi’s Hyōheki into German as Die Eiswand in 1979. Benl studied at Tokyo University before the war, and submitted his doctorate on the ideals of Zeami, the noh master, in 1943.

Professor Benl also translated works by Murasaki Shikibu, Yoshida Kenkō, Shiga Naoya, Ibuse Masuji, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Funabashi Seiichi and Abe Kōbō. He was Germany’s retort to Donald Keene. Why did he pick Hyōheki in particular? (He translated Inoue’s Tempyō no iraka (The rooftile of Tempyō) and Ryōjū (The hunting gun) too). Perhaps it was because his first academic post was in Munich, the capital city of German alpinism. But this is just a guess…

(Continued)