“Mountain photography” (3)

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

The question of costs: Whatever type of camera is preferred, the amount of money one can reasonably afford to spend is an important consideration. To go abroad on holiday equipped with only a cheap camera intended to give passable results in one's garden snapshots is to risk failure or disappointment in photographing scenes and events which would have been of permanent value.

Figure from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner.

On the other hand, to spend an undue amount on equipment does not of itself assure success. It is really surprising what quality can be obtained with cameras, which are neither modern nor expensive, by workers who know what they are doing. It is equally surprising what appalling results a £100 miniature can yield when not handled with the skill it needs and deserves.

The man whose pocket is limited (and whose is not in these days?) may need to plan his expenditure very carefully, and perhaps will prefer to spend at most £10 or so on a camera and accessories so as to leave a balance available for his transport to the mountains; in preference to exhausting his money on an expensive luxury outfit and so restricting himself to hills nearer home.

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” (2)

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

Mountain districts abroad: Of all the greater mountain areas the most accessible to Britons are the ALPS themselves, stretching from France, through Switzerland and Italy to merge via the DOLOMITES and the Eastern Alps into the mountain mass of the Balkans. Before the war it was cheaper and quicker to visit SWITZERLAND from London than the Isle of Skye.

A ridge of the Tödi (Switzerland): photo by Andreas Pedrett.
Illustration from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner. 

For the better part of a century these districts have devoted themselves to the tourist traffic and though much of the scenery has been, so to speak, salted down into "beauty spots", yet the mountain areas are so great that much remains in an unspoilt and natural condition. At all levels, from the lakesides to the upper valleys and the last heights of rock and ice, the photographer will find no lack of subjects for his camera, and at all points there is adequate scope for little journeys off the beaten track, affording the chance of personal discovery of new and unusual viewpoints from which to photograph the hills.

Whilst the lower valleys, especially on the fertile and sunny southern slopes, are richly wooded in great variety, one might perhaps venture a complaint about the upper valleys which do not show great variety of tree growth. There is a certain sameness about them, as if they have been modelled according to a recipe of pine and fir tree, more pine tree with a little larch, picturesque chalets – and beyond all this rather "pretty" foreground, the glaciers and the peaks. Each valley represents minor variations on this excellent but restricted theme. Even RUSKIN, a great admirer and student of Swiss scenery, was compelled to become statistical in his consideration of this problem of pines, and to conclude that each valley must contain not less than five million.

Consequently, although many pleasant pictures can be made in the valleys in summer, the possibilities are fairly easily exhausted and then opportunities for striking photography are best sought at rather higher levels, where the trees thin out and the views open out a little more. Journeys to the many mountain huts will be productive of rich rewards. Most of these can be reached by little more than path walking - up rather steep paths it is true – but offering no difficulty to strong walkers and involving no dangerous glacier crossings or intricate route finding. In this way a night can be spent at higher levels, for the sake of the sunset and sunrise, neither of which is always visible in the deeply cut valley, and for the full views of the high snow peaks.

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” (1)

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

Approach to the subject: First attempts in mountains are not likely to yield much more than a series of prints giving food for thought and consideration of what not to do next time. There is an absence of the clear-cut forms of the town, of strong light and shade, and a lack of familiar elements unless friends are taken in the foreground: when the mountain may immediately be compelled to adopt a very subsidiary role. "That's the summit of SNOWDON just under Mary's hat."

On the summit plateau, Mt Blanc (detail) - photo by F S Smythe.
Illustration from Mountain Photography by C Douglas Milner.

It is best to begin with subjects where the sun is shining from one side — then the shapes of the hills are revealed. To have the light coming directly from behind the camera will show a very featureless result, whilst to use contre jour with the sun more or less directly in front of the lens demands skilled attention. A pale yellow filter — quite pale — will help to keep the sky in its proper place, instead of glaring blankly along the top of the picture. Beyond this, other kinds of filter may only confuse the mind, until experience has been gained.

I do not think overmuch attention should be given to "correct" composition in the early stages. It is more important to find out what range of subjects can be well photographed so as to make prints of sufficient interest and contrast and to be able to secure a series of well-exposed, sharp negatives, which include what it was intended to include. When this is achieved it is time enough to think about the best arrangement, the special effects obtainable with filters, about striking schemes of lighting and about tackling subjects in conditions so adverse that in the early days no hope of success could have been entertained.

In all this, of course, there will be happy accidents. The camera will, in spite of the inexperienced hand guiding it, occasionally produce something which gives the photographer a thrill of achievement, and spurs him on to attain the degree of skill which makes such rewards more frequent and certain.

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.

“The Mountain” (2)

Continued: a walk around a once-famous historian’s riff on the Alps.

La Montagne is hard to categorise. It’s partly a travel book, in which the Michelets jointly write up their visits to various mountain resorts and hot springs. Then again, they sally forth into geophysics and botany, along the lines of what we’d now call nature or science writing. 

Amphitheatre of the forests.
Illustration from La Montagne. 

Here and there – see the chapter entitled “The Amphitheatre of the Forests" – they anticipate what we’d term ecological thinking. And some of their insights have gained mightily in resonance since they were first put on paper: this one, in particular, hits for distance:

It is on the brow of Mont Blanc, more or less overhung with ice, that we may read the future destiny and fortunes of Europe, the seasons of serene peace, and the abrupt cataclysms which overthrow empires and sweep away dynasties. (Part 1, Chapter III)

Mont Blanc and its glaciers.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Logically enough, the next chapter broadens the focus to “The European Water Reservoir”. Four of the great rivers of Europe, the Po, the Rhine, the Rhone and the Inn (the true Danube) are brothers, says Michelet, “springing from one and the same mass, the heart of the system, the heart of the European world”. In these Alps of Switzerland:

Water is life begun. The circulation of life, under an aerial or a liquid form, takes place upon these heights. They are the mediators, the arbiters of sundered or antagonistic elements. They make their harmony and peace. They accumulate them in glaciers, and then equitably distribute them among the nations.

The watershed of Europe.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Lunch is life sustained, I like to think. This one, comprising a belated cheese butty, is taken beside the Lai Grond, a little lake that on a windless day would reflect Piz Ela. 

The Lai Grond under Piz Ela.

As it is, a cold wind sends cats’ paws ruffling over the water, driving me smartly onwards. The mountain keeps frowning down, as if to chastise the arrogant thought of circumambulating him in a day.

The lake of Lucerne.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Switzerland's lakes and rivers get a chapter all to themselves in La Montagne. “No other country,” Michelet writes, “possesses these superb mirrors in such magnificence.” As you’d expect, the historian’s perspective breaks through here and there. The Danube, he notes, “formerly interposed its furious floods between us and Turkish despotism”.

A landscape in the Pyrenees.
Illustration from La Montagne.

The next few chapters draw on the personal experiences of the Michelets in their visits to hot springs in the Pyrenees and Apennine Italy. Then follows a kind of geophysical interlude with chapters surveying the state of nineteenth-century knowledge about the continents, the polar regions and volcanoes, before the couple revert to relating their holiday excursions, this time in the Swiss Engadine district. It’s all a bit of a hodgepodge…

The volcano of Taal.
Illustration from La Montagne.

So what is this book actually about? Labouring up the second pass of the day, I have little energy left to consider the question. Like the Michelets themselves when they put pen to paper, we must admit to being, if not clean past our youth, then with some smack of age in us…

The Tinzenhorn from the Pass d'Ela.

At 3pm, I haul myself up onto the Pass d’Ela (2,723m). Already the sun is leaning tendentiously towards the west, and I take a moment to appreciate how its slanting rays throw into razor-sharp relief the crumbling cliffs of Piz Ela and its neighbour the Tinzenhorn.

Piz Ela from the west.

The crumbling cliffs … now there’s a clue to the mystery of La Montagne. On their way to the high valley of the Engadine, the Michelets travel over the “The Pass of the Grisons”, better known today as the Julier. Throughout the journey, Michelet records – and one infers this has to be Jules himself, complete with capitals and an exclamation mark – “one idea was constantly recurring to my mind – THE DEATH OF THE MOUNTAIN!”

These thoughts, he explains, were triggered by the landslides and rubble chutes that abound along the high mountain roads. They are called lapiaz in the local dialect or, more picturesquely, the “cemeteries of the devil”. But it soon becomes clear that slope stability or otherwise is the least of the historian’s concerns. Rather, it’s the rot at the heart of the body politic that troubles him:

But what will be the end if this devastation, from the lower grades of and the vulgar lapiaz of egotism and moral barrenness, should extend further, and if the process of erosion gain upon the immense masses of the people, indifferent to all things, and deficient both in the desire and capability of good? There are moments when one dreads that such will be the case. 

Despairing cries are uttered from century to century. About 1800 Grainville wrote “The Last Man”. Sénancourt, Byron, and others, believed in the approaching end of the world. But, for my part, I think it immortal. At unforeseen points, and by unsuspected fibres which prove to be still youthful, it resuscitates itself. Wavering between so many objects in this present age, it still presses firmly forward in the path of science, and hence secures for itself another great chance of renovation. It will refresh its heart at the well-springs of Mind, and revive its moral flame at the source of Intellectual Light.

Late afternoon at the Piz Ela hut. 

Our own daylight cuts off abruptly as I cross over the base of Piz Ela’s north ridge. From here, it’s all downhill through the yellowing and umbrageous larch forests. It's a good thousand metres down to Bergün and its station. At least the fallen larch needles on the path will cushion the knee-jarring descent...

Now there’s time to think about where Jules Michelet was coming from. Born in 1798, at the apogee of the Directorate’s power, he dedicated much of his life to writing a book that a modern scholar has called “the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography”. So he was a republican born and bred. By the same token, his career prospered after the July Revolution of 1830, also known as the Second French Revolution, but faltered when Napoleon III came to power in 1852.

These vicissitudes echo through La Montagne. Reflecting on the various theories of mountain-building, Michelet points out that the French savants tend to favour “catastrophist” explanations while their English counterparts are mostly “uniformitarians”. The difference, he muses, must be down to the regular upheavals experienced in France, as compared with England’s relative social and political stability.

Mountain-building: A Himalayan landscape.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Nevertheless, Michelet is not wholly pessimistic about his continent’s future. In his final chapter, oddly entitled “Will our Era Succeed in Regenerating Itself?”, he opines that “our decay cannot be compared to the rottenness of some peoples of the past, such as the Byzantine, of whom sterility was the conspicuous and distinctive sign…”

Against such decadence, he holds up Switzerland as the “ever memorable cradle of European freedom”, whose past battles “prepared the liberty of the world”. As for the mountains, they have helped him “develop the heroic capabilities which we derive from Nature”.

Bergün/Bravuogn in autumn.
Image courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

By the time I stumble down into Bergün, my own capabilities feel as if they’re flat-lining. On the way to the station, as the few street lights start to flicker into life, I’m still thinking about Jules and Athénaïs Michelet. After a century and a half, their literary collaboration still has the power to charm. On the other hand, it'll be a while before their writing style comes back into fashion. And their book can't be described as anything other than a gallimaufry.

Yet even a gallimaufry can incorporate some rich ingredients. And the cantankerous old republican can sound surprisingly contemporary when he prognosticates about the future of Mont Blanc's glaciers, or frets about Europe’s political culture. If there were ever a time to take another look at his writings, would that not be now, I wonder….

But as Michelet says in his own final chapter, this is surely “enough for the day, enough”.

References

Jules Michelet, La Montagne (1868), translated by W H Davenport Adams as The Mountain, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1886. My copy came from Chris Bartle at Glacier Books in Pitlochry, Scotland. If you ask nicely, he might even be able to find another one for you.

“The Mountain” (1)

Walking around a once-famous historian’s riff on the Alps and liberty.

“He who ascends the mountain rises towards the light.” I’m reminded of this aphorism from a long-dead author as the trees start to thin out above Preda (1,789m), the highest rail station north of Switzerland’s Albula Pass.

What kind of trees? The slanting October sun backlights a particoloured forest of golden larches and gloomy Arolla pines. Yet I wouldn’t have noticed their cohabitation unless I’d just been reading The Mountain, a late work by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and his wife Athénaïs (1826–1899). There’s surely a wistful note in their write-up of these very woods:

The whole life of the country has centred in two trees: the heroic and vigorous arolla, which, if left to itself, would endure almost forever; and the smiling larch, incessantly renewed, and its yearly verdure simulating eternal youth.

Landscape in the Engadine.
Illustration from Jules Michelet, La Montagne.

The remark comes halfway through a chapter subtitled “Decay of the tree and of man”. Michelet and his younger wife are travelling in the Engadine valley, just south of my hike for the day. Yet, although they are taking a vacation, little in the way of holiday gaiety imbues his writing. In this chapter alone, the historian ruminates on winter’s approach, the destruction of the region’s forests, and the inevitable retreat of mountain plants in the face of interlopers from the plains:

To this wild ancient order, which was in all things distinguished by original characteristics, strongly marked, will succeed the new order, much richer but less varied, and with one object exactly like another.

Decay of the mountain forest.
Illustration from Jules Michelet, La Montagne.

I allow myself ten minutes for a second breakfast on a sunny boulder just above the treeline – no more, as there are a good thousand metres to gain between Preda and the Fuorcla da Tschitta (2,830 m), and the latter is only the first of two alpine passes in the day’s plan.

Minutes after setting out again, I start up a magnificent fox, who runs up and over an old moraine wall to escape. When Michelet published La Montagne, in 1868, an icecap would have surmounted the peak ahead, but its moraines now embrace nothing but boulders and rubble.

The glaciers of Grindelwald
Title page of the English version of La Montagne (1886).

At least the glaciers have left some traces of their passing. It’s difficult to say the same of Michelet’s mountain book. An English translation, published by Thomas Nelson in 1886, seems to have done little to promote him abroad. Fortunately, Michelet had made his name decades before with his multivolume history of France. Even today, he is remembered as the first to use the term “Renaissance” in its modern sense of a cultural movement.

So what was Michelet doing, late in life, writing about mountains? The answer resides in the second Mme. Michelet. For theirs was a very literary marriage. The then Mlle. Athénaïs Mialaret started a correspondence with Michelet while she was tutoring the children of Princess Cantacuzène in Vienna, and married him in 1849, a decade after the death of his first wife. 

Inspiring in her husband an interest in natural history, Athénaïs worked with him on a series of books: La Montagne (1868) was the fourth to appear, after L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857) and La Mer (1861). La Montagne appeared under his name only, but Athénaïs contributed at least two chapters, focusing mainly on alpine flowers.

Their joint authorship may account for La Montagne’s uneven style. While Jules Michelet likes to sum matters up in a pithy maxim, as above, Athénaïs tends towards the effusive:

The peerless spring-anemone bent downwards, attired in a fairy garb of pale lilac. Her hour had already passed. She lay, as it were, asleep in the dream of a happy moment. Long, soft, airy, and electric silken folds falling over her head, enwrapped her maternal bosom. In this first apparition of the Alp I greeted a sweet and charming soul, which revealed to me the presence of God in a wilderness of desolation.

Pushing through a wilderness of desolation left behind by a vanished corrie glacier, I come up on the first pass, the Fuorcla da Tschitta (2,830m), well before noon. 

Piz Ela from the Fuorcla da Tschitta.

Any sense of self-congratulation crumbles when two women skim up from the opposite direction. Kitted out as trail runners, they have already despatched two thirds of this 26-kilometre circuit around the massive dolomitic bulwark of Piz Ela (3,339m). Since I am shod more traditionally in Vibram-soled boots and carry a pack with a heavy old-school DSLR, I need to get a move on. October days are short…

(Continued)