Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (3)

Review concluded: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

During the Edo period (1603–1868), Mt Fuji started to attract a following that went far beyond its religious devotees. Thanks to Edo’s growing influence on popular culture – and what has changed in our own century, we may ask – millions of Japanese came to see the mountain as a familiar image in pictures, books and ceramic glaze. And, in time, even on bathhouse walls.

A six-panel screen showing Mt Fuji by Kano Tan'yu.
Image by courtesy of Christie's.

Meanwhile, the feudal authorities started to arrogate Fuji’s prestige to themselves. At the “heart of Edo castle”, the bakufu’s official painter Kanō Tan'yū (1602–1674) placed Mt Fuji in the centre of a diorama that covered a set of sliding doors in the shogun’s retiring rooms.

If Mt Fuji was a nascent symbol of state, its theology was now too important to leave to the discretion of temple priests and the Fujikō houses. The neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), an advisor to four shoguns, weighed in with an attack on the legends invented by Buddhist priests about Mt Fuji and the foreign-influenced tale of Kaguya-hime. 

The goddess Konohanasakuya-hime in flight.
Rendition by Evelyn Paul, c.1912, for a book on Japanese myths.

The mountain’s true deity, Hayashi asserted, was Konohanasakuya-hime, a fire goddess who first appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (although not in connection with Mt Fuji, which these chronicles omit to mention).

In time, the nationalist stirrings fomented by Razan and fellow thinkers would culminate in an officially sponsored cultural revolution. Soon after it came to power in 1868, the Meiji government launched a campaign to disentwine Buddhism and Shinto, the so-called haibutsu kishaku movement that aimed to "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni". On and around Mt Fuji, temple buildings were torn down, and sculptures removed or vandalised.

In 1874, the Shintoist official placed in charge of the Fuji Sengen shrines personally led an expedition to remove any Buddhist icon that remained on the mountain. Yet some statues from the Yakushi hall on the summit were rescued and brought down to Fujinomiya, where, as Bernstein documents with a photograph, they still preside over the sake vats at a brewery.

Buddhist statues brought down from Mt Fuji and now
displayed at the Takasago Brewery, Fujinomiya.
Courtesy Butsuzo World blog. 

While the government’s muddled and inconsistent anti-Buddhist campaign soon fell by the wayside, its effects were lasting. The Sengen shrines at the mountain’s foot remain “thoroughly Shintoized” to this day. And the Fujikō schools were ultimately forced into a Shintoist framework, accelerating their decline in a modernising age.

Meanwhile the government had discovered that, as a means of inculcating the desired virtues in the populace, it was much more effective to indoctrinate them at school than to meddle with their forms of worship.

Mt Fuji in a Taisho-era songbook for schools (1911).
Courtesy of Shoka Shinto (唱歌深層) blog.

Thus it was that Mt Fuji started appearing in school textbooks well before the Imperial Rescript on Education was promulgated in 1890. A songbook issued in 1881 includes a set of lyrics on “Fujisan” that states, as quoted by Bernstein, “Foreigners gaze up admiringly. So do Japanese. [Fuji] is our pride.” A reading primer published in 1900 shows a picture of Fuji accompanied by the words “A big mountain. This is Japan’s greatest mountain”. And so on. 

At several removes, perhaps, the Ministry of Education also presided over Nonaka Itaru’s (1867–1955) bid to turn Mt Fuji into a mountain of science. The ministry was the ultimate employer of Wada Yūji (1859–1918), the professional meteorologist who encouraged Itaru in his attempt to overwinter on Mt Fuji while making hourly weather observations. 

A cinematic rendition of the Nonakas' sojourn on Mt Fuji.
Poster advertising Toei's 1967 movie Fujisancho.

The epic story of Itaru’s struggle for survival on the blizzard-wracked summit in the winter of 1895, loyally supported by his wife Chiyoko (1871–1923), has provided fodder for movies, school textbooks and blogs to this very day.

In “A global mountain on a human planet”, his second-to-last chapter, Bernstein presents Fuji as the locus of modern industry and military firing ranges. In it, he describes how the papermaking and other manufacturies established at its base have come up against their ecological limits, whether by exhausting the groundwater that percolates out of the mountain, or by pouring long-lived pollutants into the surrounding ocean. 

Surprisingly little snow for the time of year...
Mt Fuji on January 21 this year (Project Hyakumeizan).

Fuji also serves as a waymark of climate breakdown. As a kind of synecdoche for the fix we’re in, no snow fell on the mountain during October for the first time on record in 2024.

Bernstein’s concluding chapter chronicles the two attempts to have Fuji inscribed as a world heritage site. The first try, during the 1990s, foundered because the volcano was to be submitted as a “natural” monument – leading to the objection that it was just one more stratovolcano among many on the Pacific Rim, and hence not especially heritage-worthy.

Heritage Fuji: from the official video....

As history relates, the mountain fared better as a cultural site. Promoted as “Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration”, it acceded to world heritage status in June 2013. Inevitably, perhaps, the official webpage marking the inscription mentions hardly any of the “complex and contested history of the mountain”, to say nothing of the ecological and policy challenges brewing around it.

Yet, says Bernstein, “It is only by accounting for the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, that we can do historical justice to the multiple lives of Fuji and, one could argue, even more fully celebrate this famous but in many ways hidden peak.”

It’s fair to say that, in any other language than Japanese, nobody has ever celebrated the full panoply of Mt Fuji’s history more comprehensively than Professor Bernstein. And, given that on past performance, full-length English-language books about this mountain appear erupt only once or twice a century, we will likely be reaching for this magnum opus for quite a few decades yet.

References

Andrew Bernstein, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, Princeton University Press, September 2024.

H Byron Earhart, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, University of South Carolina, October 2011.

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

Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (2)

Review continued: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

In the early historical period, Fuji lay far beyond the ken of Japan’s movers and shakers. That changed as Japan’s political centre of gravity moved east, first in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) and then, with finality in the Edo period (1603–1868). For would-be writers and travellers on and around Fuji, it helped too that a series of destructive flank eruptions ended in the second half of the ninth century.

Kaguya-hime ascends Mt Fuji.
Print by Toyohara Chikanobu (courtesy of Artelino).

Bernstein deftly charts the parallel shifts in religious belief in his second chapter, entitled “From Angry God to Parent of the World”. In time, the angry male deity, who had to be appeased with apologies and promotions in court rank, gave ground to more emollient personalities such as Kaguya-hime, a princess from the moon. A monk called Matsudai brought Buddhism to Fuji’s summit in 1149, when he set up a temple there, and in the following centuries pilgrims started to ascend the mountain regularly by several different routes. 

By 1707, religious beliefs surrounding Mt. Fuji were so well established that not even that year’s highly destructive flank eruption could shake them. In his chapter on the fallout of the Hōei event, Bernstein sets out the feudal government’s efforts to deal with the famine and devastation caused by the resulting ashfalls – which buried nearby villages and dumped up to eight centimetres of ash more than a hundred kilometres away.

Mayhem caused by the Hoei Eruption in 1707.
Print by Katsushika Hokusai (courtesy of Japan Forward). 

These efforts were hampered by the dual structure of the Tokugawa regime, in which the central Edo-based authority presided more or less uneasily over semi-independent regional fiefdoms. In prosperous times, the system worked well enough to sustain the shogunate for two and a half centuries. But, as Bernstein points out, a disaster on the scale of the Hōei eruption would test any political system to its limits.

In the event, the shogunate took two unprecedented steps. It expropriated more than half of the territory of Odawara, the feudal domain lying to the south of Mt. Fuji, effectively nationalising the relief and recovery efforts. And it imposed a nationwide tax to pay for these activities. But the relief, when it came, was distributed unevenly, causing some groups to suffer more than others.

Even so, the magistrate in charge of the disaster zone, Ina Tadanobu (d. 1712) played his part with such sincerity and dedication that grateful citizens later established shrines in his memory. A local legend has him making unauthorised distributions of rice from government storehouses and taking the resulting punishment on his own head. But here we stray outside the realm of history into terrain that would later be exploited for novelistic effect. And that is quite another story…

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji: print by Katsushika Hokusai.
Colourisation by ChatGPT. 

About a generation after the Hōei disaster, an oil merchant from Edo named Jikigyō Miroku (1671–1733) fasted to death on Mt Fuji’s eastern flank. Bernstein opens his fourth chapter, on “Holy Fuji”, with an account of this incident. Jikigyō’s sacrifice ushered in the heyday of popular pilgrimages to the mountain – perhaps too popular, in the eyes of the government, who found them subversive of social order. In the end, though, the officials failed in their attempts to rein in the Fujikō groups.

By the mid-nineteenth century, women too were climbing ever higher on the mountain as they pushed against the traditional restrictions; disguised as a man, a female pilgrim from Edo attained the summit as early as 1838.

As Bernstein points out, economic forces helped women to press their case. After all, the more pilgrims the better, given that they represented “an important source of income for the communities around Fuji, especially those on the northern and eastern sides of the mountain, where cold weather and the fallout produced by the Hōei eruption made large-scale agriculture difficult.”

The upshot was an economic rivalry between the various pilgrimage centres that, to some extent, has lasted to this day. The fourth chapter chronicles the Edo-era origins of such disputes in some detail. After the second world war, the age-old rivalries of Shizuoka and Yamanashi flared again when the Sengen Shrine at Fujinomiya (Shizuoka) laid claim to the ownership of Fuji’s summit area. This controversy and the ensuing lengthy court case, settled only in 1974, are set out in the book’s seventh chapter.

The “fact that the mountain symbolized a supposedly unified nation," comments Bernstein, "made it a flashpoint in battles over the form that nation should take.” And perhaps more so than ever in modern times.

(Continued)

Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (1)

Book review: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

“I once looked around for materials for a book on Fuji,” wrote Fukada Kyūya in the relevant chapter of his most famous book, “but found so much that I finally gave up the project.”

Where the Nihon Hyakumeizan author feared to tread, we are grateful that Andrew Bernstein has waded in. After pursuing his project both on and off the mountain for over a decade, he has given us Fuji: A Mountain in the Making. Published by Princeton University Press in September last year, this is a long-awaited vade mecum to the volcano’s history.

For history is the operative word here. To do full justice to Professor Bernstein’s achievement, it’s worth taking a moment to revisit his predecessors. Full-length books on Japan's and possibly the planet's most famous mountain are surprisingly far and few between in the English language. The first was probably the Chicago-based ethnographer Frederick Starr’s Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan, published in 1924.

Starr’s book touches on the mountain’s presence in art, poetry and folklore, as well as its physical geography – vegetation gets a whole chapter to itself. But the prime focus, as the title suggests, lies on Mt. Fuji as a locus for pilgrimages. Indeed, for reasons never quite explained in the book, Starr made his own Mt. Fuji climbs garbed in the traditional cotton robes of a pilgrim.

After Starr, English-reading fans of Japan’s top mountain had to wait almost nine decades – until 2011 – when Harry Byron Earhart came out with Mt Fuji, Icon of Japan. As one would expect from an emeritus professor of comparative religion, this book’s emphasis also lay on the mountain’s history as a destination for worship. Earhart, like Starr, accompanied pilgrims on more than one ritual ascent, getting perhaps as close as any foreign writer could to the spirit that inspires them.

By contrast, Andrew Bernstein (pictured left) is a professor of history. Taking a chronological approach, he zooms out widely to show how people of all kinds – not just poets, painters and pilgrims, but politicians and papermakers too – have variously placated, portrayed, promulgated and exploited Mt. Fuji through time. “Any history privileges some views over others,” he writes in his introduction, “but by treating Fuji as an actor in, and product of, both the physical world and the human imagination, I hope to dispel some of the ‘magical haze’ that surrounds the volcano.”

In this, he has succeeded magnificently. If Fuji: A Mountain in the Making were to be screened, it would need a Cecil B. DeMille to direct it. In three hundred or so pages, the book takes us from the volcano’s fiery origins right up to its recent accession to world heritage status. On the way, it surveys Fuji’s prehistory, the shifting religious beliefs surrounding it, the response to the 1707 eruption disaster, the mountain’s transformation into a symbol of state from the nineteenth century onwards, and much more.

The origins and etymology of Mt. Fuji’s name are somewhat hazy. The Sino-Japanese characters used to write it in early historical times imply that the volcano was seen as undying or eternal. Contrarily, however, the savants have ruled that the graceful cone we see today, the so-called New Fuji, dates back no more than about seventeen thousand years – long after humans first migrated to Japan. So, in this sense, Mt Fuji is a mountain that has grown up alongside its human admirers.

Bernstein’s first chapter starts with an elegant synopsis of the latest thinking about the mountain’s geology and also the people who lived on its slopes in prehistoric times. The way that stones are lined up at some of these sites hint that, even in that remote era, Mt. Fuji may have served a “ritual focal point”.

Mt Fuji as a symbol of Japan...
Image by courtesy of ChatGPT.

The haze thins a bit when we come to the historical period. Yet, surprisingly perhaps to those accustomed to thinking of Mt Fuji as a symbol of Japan, the mountain is nowhere mentioned in Japan’s oldest ‘myth histories’, the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Nihon Shoki (720 CE).

Instead, Mt Fuji makes its first written appearance in the Hitachi Fudoki, a regional gazetteer completed around 721 CE that deals with a province in eastern Japan. The portrayal of what would one day become Japan’s top mountain was far from favourable, showing it as an inhospitable curmudgeon in contrast to a friendly and liberal Mt. Tsukuba. I can’t resist here patching in the lively retelling of this legend from Nihon Hyakumeizan:

When the goddess Mioya went visiting other deities, she lighted one evening on Fuji’s summit. But that mountain’s guardian spirit would not let her stay, saying the day was unpropitious. Mioya flew into a rage and told the god of Fuji that, henceforth, his mountain would be locked forever in the embrace of frost and snow, winter and summer alike. With that, she whirled herself away to the east, to Tsukuba, whose guardian welcomed her warmly and prepared a feast. Delighted beyond measure, Mioya pledged this mountain would wax prosperous with the days and months.

Despite this unpromising start, Fuji had achieved something of an image upgrade by the time that the Man'yōshū, Japan’s oldest extant poetry collection, appeared about forty years later. In the Man'yōshū verses that Bernstein uses to head up his first chapter, the poet Takahashi no Mushimaro (fl. c. 730) sings of a “treasure of a mountain” and one that houses a god who defends the realm.

Even so, the Man'yōshū poems featuring Tsukuba outnumber those about Fuji by about two to one. The reason, Bernstein suggests, might be simply ‘out of sight, out of mind’: in those days, Fuji lay far beyond the ken of Japan’s movers and shakers…

(Continued)

A meizanologist's diary (107)

New Year’s Day: Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu – the Year of the Horse has dawned, so congratulations to all who read this blog. Although, it has to be admitted, it’s far from clear whether it has dawned at all in the Sensei’s hometown this morning. Rain and sleet scatter down from lowering clouds all through breakfast, so that it takes a warm bowl of home-made o-zōni, accompanied by oddments of osechi ryori from a supermarket, all washed down with a fine blend of Swiss-roasted coffee and chicory, before we can steel ourselves to attempt a mountain hatsumōde – the first shrine visit of the year.

For any local meizanologist, the destination has to be Monju, a mountain that musters just one metre of altitude for each day of the year. But height isn’t everything: “It rises as if floating in the surrounding plains, possessing a presence that exceeds its elevation,” says YamaKei, pressing Monju's case with assiduity. 

Even if it doesn't float very far above its surrounding plain, Monju has quite a backstory. Not only was it opened in the first year of Yōrō (717) by the mountain mystic Taichō – who made the first recorded ascent of Hakusan in the same year – but, some twelve centuries later, the Hyakumeizan author and his friends inscribed their names on its summit shrine. And, as any classical mountain should in this part of the world, it disposes of three distinct summits.  

It's still drizzling when we park the car. Bear bell a-jingling, the Sensei lights out at a blistering pace – presumably to get out from under the dripping cryptomerias – and we take the variation route across Monju’s north flank. This path is slightly less crowded than the normal route. By the time we emerge beside a pavilion dedicated to the Kannon (this being a very ecumenical mountain), the drizzle has turned to wet snow that limns every branch and bough.

Traditionally, a monk from a nearby temple attends the summit shrine on New Year's Day (as I said, few mountains are as ecumenical as this one). His main duty seems to be handing out “eto” – miniature votive animals – on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. As he usually runs out by the time we get here, we avoid importuning him to prevent embarrassment. 

But, no matter, on the way down, we drop in at a viewpoint just as the sun starts to peek between the clouds. And then a stray ray of light picks out a lifelike “eto” that somebody has scooped out of the snow and left recumbent on a picnic table. So our new year starts with a horse after all, even if it looks a bit like a cow.

Famous mountains with a difference

After giving up the triathlon, an Osaka man takes on the Hyakumeizan...

“Climbing mountains on your own gives you a great sense of fulfilment and accomplishment …. That's why I want to see if I can actually do the hundred famous mountains solo.” Many a Hyakumeizan fan might agree with these words, but few face such challenges as the man who uttered them. For Kuwamura Masaharu is currently questing his hundred mountains with only a pair of lightweight crutches to help him on his way. 

"Challenging mountains with a disability": 
Gakujin magazine accompanied Kuwahara-san to Mt Kongo in late 2024.

Now in his early sixties and retired, Kuwamura-san (b.1963) has gone about on one leg for most of his life. Diagnosed at the age of eight with a bone cancer, he underwent an operation that involved the amputation of his left leg at the hip. And since he couldn’t have a prosthetic limb fitted, he wields his crutches wherever he goes, on city streets and mountain trails alike.

Kuwahara-kun
with his mother (NHK).

While he was growing up in Osaka, he worked out ways to play with his friends and keep up with them on a bicycle. His mother encouraged him. Instead of trying to hide the fact that her son had a disability, she actively took him out to local events and public places. “At first, I was embarrassed, but I soon got used to it and didn't mind the curious looks,” Kuwamura recalled last year in an interview with Gakujin, Japan’s second-oldest mountain monthly.

By the time he was twenty, Kuwamura had thoughts of aiming for the Paralympics. At the age of twenty-three, he did become the first Japanese to win a medal in badminton at the FESPIC in Indonesia, which was the start of the Asian Para Games. Then, around the start of this century, now in his forties, he started competing in triathlons, inspiring more and more people with disabilities to follow his example.

Not that he's ever limited himself to events for the disabled: “I didn't like being treated differently as a disabled person, and I often competed in tournaments for able-bodied athletes. Of course, I lost a lot, but I think there's more to be gained from fighting and losing against stronger opponents than winning in a narrow field and playing defensively. What's important isn't winning or losing, but how high you can aim for yourself," he told Gakujin.

Unfortunately, the triathlons started to undermine Kuwamura’s health. The additional stress on his liver worsened a longstanding infection with hepatitis C, which he’d incurred via a blood transfusion during his childhood. Hospitalised in Chiba and suffering from diabetes, a side effect of the treatment he was undergoing, he was close to giving up on life. He credits his recovery to a former colleague, Isako – now his wife – who travelled to see him from Kyoto almost every month during his year in therapy: “I consider her my saviour,” he said in the Gakujin interview.

Kuwahara-san tackles Goryu-dake.
Still from an NHK documentary (see References).

When he left hospital, Kuwamura was almost fifty. Looking around for a less intensive form of exercise than the triathlon, he soon hit on an alternative. As he put it, “I had a firm belief that climbing was the next thing I should do. Mountains are neither won nor lost, and they challenge both able-bodied and disabled people alike.” And since he’d already climbed Mt Fuji more than once while training for triathlons, the idea of tackling the Hyakumeizan followed naturally. A book too inspired him.*

Even for somebody as motivated as Kuwamura, the challenges of the Hyakumeizan are substantial. He had to turn back on Makihata-yama (1,967m), one of the easier peaks, after going two hours over his six-hour time budget for the ascent. His wrists and hands take the brunt of his crutchwork, meaning that he makes frequent visits to his chiropractor. And, of course, the crutches themselves must be replaced regularly, since breaking one on a mountain could be fatal.

Rugged Goryu...
Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Yet, by the end of last year, Kuwamura had despatched almost seven tenths of Fukada Kyūya’s time-honoured list. These included most of the marquee peaks in the Northern Alps, including rugged Tsurugi and Goryū, his sixty-fifth mountain. And as if Yari-ga-take’s chains and ladders weren’t challenging enough on their own, he chose to approach this rock spire via the Dai-Kiretto, an aery traverse over from the Hodaka peaks.

Since retiring, Kuwamura-san has also found the time to write a book. It’s called Kata-ashi de hagemu sanryо̄ (Running the ridges on one leg), and it was published in September 2024 by Gentо̄sha. As he says in the Gakujin interview, “I'd be so happy if people are inspired by my experience climbing mountains, even with just one leg, and are encouraged to give it a go themselves. And if they do, I'm really looking forward to meeting them on a mountain somewhere."

An English alpinist said something similar about seven decades ago:

I had determined to finish my own climbing for the year with the Matterhorn … To a mountaineer, to climb the Matterhorn must always possess a great significance, however often he may have climbed it or however easy its ascent may be upon a given fine day. I had another reason. If I was to give a much-needed encouragement to all those in Europe who had lost limbs in the war, and make a practical demonstration that the fatigue or inertia from which all who have lost legs suffer is a nervous fiction, then nothing was likely to call more attention, or have a better good-news value, than an ascent of the Matterhorn.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young resting after an ascent of the Grepon.
Illustration from Mountains with a Difference.

The writer was Geoffrey Winthrop Young (1876–1958), who during the Belle Époque had put up some of Europe’s most difficult alpine routes. This pioneer work ended in 1917, when Young lost his left leg to a shell explosion on the Italian front. But a decade later, then in his fifties and fitted with an ingenious metal peg partly of his own contriving, he felt ready to make an alpine comeback. And so, signing up some of his old guides, he reclimbed several of the highest peaks around Zermatt, Chamonix and other centres. The book in which he describes these one-legged adventures is called Mountains with a Difference.

Kuwamura-san aims to reach his one hundredth summit by his sixty-fifth birthday. When he does, let’s hope that he will update his book or write another one. Whatever title he may choose, readers will learn something about the human spirit. Some of them will probably decide to give the mountains a go themselves. And most will concur that Kuwamura-san’s are truly the Hyakumeizan with a difference.

References

Gakujin magazine, “Shо̄gai to tomo ni yama ni idomu” (Tackling the mountains with a disability: an interview with Kuwamura Masaharu), December 2024 edition.

NHK documentary (English version) on Kuwamura’s Hyakumeizan campaign and Goryū climb.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Mountains with a Difference, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951. 

• *Note: Surprisingly, Kuwamura-san is not the first Japanese author to write about mountain-climbing on one leg. That honour probably belongs to Yokota Sadao (b.1901) who published Matsubadzue tozan 40-nen (Forty years of climbing on crutches) in 1974. He was famous, among other things, for roaming the mountains in sandals and a yukata, a style that even in his day was distinctively retro.
  
  

  

  
  Born in 1901, Yokota graduated from primary school in 1914 at the age of twelve and started out as an apprentice in a soy sauce factory in mountainous Nagano Prefecture. About three years later, he noticed a small protrusion on the back of his right knee. This gradually swelled up until the leg had to be amputated in May 1922 following a diagnosis of synovial chondromatosis. There are more details of his life in this blog post (in Japanese).

  After recovering, and having lost about 16 kilos in weight, Yokota climbed around fifty famous peaks all over Japan, starting with his “home mountain” of Togakushi. His tally included Hakkoda, Tanigawa, Yari, Shirouma, Kiso-kaikoma, Unzen and the “Three sacred mountains” of Mt Fuji, Tateyama and Hakusan. He attained the last-named peak in his seventieth year.  Unsurprisingly, Kuwamura-san has taken Yokota’s climbing life and his book as an inspiration for his own Hyakumeizan project.

“Mountain photography” (9)

Hints on the art and technique from a practitioner of the nineteen-forties.

Composition: Arrangement, design or composition of the chosen subject within the picture space is very intangible, to say the least. It simply cannot be reduced to rule, except in the widest of terms, and though it is possible to set down a few obvious errors which it is probably desirable to avoid, the successful steering of an arrangement among these pitfalls does not of itself assure success. 

A composite picture in the Chinese manner by Chin San Long, FRPS.
Illustration from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner.

There is a definite scheme of formal landscape which has come down to us from the eighteenth century which has the merits of being harmless and necessary, if dull. For the concoction of conventional landscape in terms of foreground, middle distance, background and sky, all neatly divided into thirds or along "lines of beauty", is at least better than no sort of convention at all. The Print Room of the British Museum, and the provincial art galleries (one or two London galleries are provincial in this respect) are full of stiff compositions on these lines, but it is doubtful if much study of them with a view to imitation is very good for anyone.

Fujiyama by H G Ponting,  FRGS, FRPS.
Illustration from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner.

Obvious errors of the kind I have mentioned include:

Exact symmetry. The mountain summit, the horizon line, the line of a lake or foreground tree is best kept away from the exact centre lines.

Equal divisions into areas of lake, mountain and sky are generally unpleasant. Lines of interest-roads, etc, with or without figures, tend to distract attention if they are at the extreme edge of a picture, or appear to be moving out of it.

Plain simple tones and lines are the easiest to deal with, a complex subject is not. This simplicity may be helped by the use of a long focus lens, or by choosing a foreground which does not assert itself and compete with the mountain for interest, to the detriment of the unity of the picture.

Figures in the foreground especially need care. If they are too large, they will attract too much attention; if too small, they might just as well not be there for all the help they give.

References

From C Douglas Milner, Mountain Photography: Its Art and Technique in Britain and Abroad, The Focal Press, First printed October 1945, reprinted June 1946.

“Mountain photography” (8)

Hints on the art and technique from a practitioner of the nineteen-forties.

Choice of subject: Many mountains are subjects of inherent beauty and dramatic quality and have strong personalities of their own with which the photographer cannot compete.

The Matterhorn by H G Ponting, FRGS, FRPS.

Illustration from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner.

Any attempt to express one's personality in a picture of, say, the MATTERHORN, is almost certain to result in a victory for the MATTERHORN. As CHARLES SIMPSON, R.I., says: "Subjects whose nature ensures a certain impressiveness as pictures ... mountains, lakes and scenic landscapes on the grand scale, do not afford the same opportunities for artistic paintings or photographs of those of a simpler character whose beauty has to be sought for and studied. Variations on a simple theme are more satisfying than grandiose panoramas."

Perhaps the idea worth aiming at may be conveyed in three imaginary comments by an observer of three mountain photographs, each of the WEISSHORN.

"I remember when we were caught in a storm on that."

The right comment for a record photograph. The mind of the observer has not been arrested by the surface of the print, but has passed on to the mountain itself, recognised it, and without any more consideration has recalled something from his memory.

"It's amazing how they get their cows up those slopes . . . Is that you standing among them?"

The WEISSHORN is lost at the top (or back) of the picture, whilst the interest has been seized by a group of cows and a man in the foreground. A very typical result of including too much.

"What a beautiful photograph. . . . Is it in the Alps?”

That may represent pictorial success to the photographer. It is recognised as beautiful, it is clearly accepted as a photograph and not an imitation of an etching or mezzotint, yet its subject matter is not a determining factor in appreciation but a mere afterthought.

A Himalayan glacier by F S Smythe.
Illustration from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner.

So that to make a first selection of subject matter, avoid scenes which conform to guidebook standards of beauty. Competent records of beauty spots can, indeed should, be made: the Blau-, Grün- or Schwarz-sees of the Continent; the BLEA TARNs at home; but their place is among the other documentary photographs of a district.

Into the same category of the pictorially impossible fall the impressive arrays of mountain summits catalogued at well-known Aussichtspunkte: and a good deal of conventional landscape in the traditional manner. Swiss scenery is especially difficult to handle with any degree of originality. Most valleys offer the mixture "as before". A few chalets, the ranks of pines, the glacier leading to the upper snows, and, finally, the rock buttresses of the distant peak standing crisply into the dark sky. One such photograph serves to ilustrate the type, all others are variations upon the same theme, and a succession of such views easily becomes dull.

References

From C Douglas Milner, Mountain Photography: Its Art and Technique in Britain and Abroad, The Focal Press, First printed October 1945, reprinted June 1946.