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.
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| 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.
2 comments:
Fun. Ruskin's problem of pines needs a bit more study. I found this on pg. 162 (archive.org version): “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.”
Glad this took your fancy, Stephen50. In fact, much of Douglas Milner's advice has aged well, I find. As for the quotation you quote, yes, I'm going to post that passage - another plum - in a few days .... : )
Now for the pines - hmm, an interesting question, but perhaps Milner is referring to Ruskin's Modern Painters, Book IV, Chapter XVII, Section 40 - does this sound right, perhaps?
"§ 40. And this is more especially and humiliatingly true of pine forest. Nearly all other kinds of wood may be reduced, over large spaces, to undetailed masses; but there is nothing but patience for pines; and this has been one of the principal reasons why artists call Switzerland "unpicturesque." There may perhaps be, in the space of a Swiss valley which comes into a picture, from five to ten millions of well grown pines. Every one of these pines must be drawn before the scene can be. And a pine cannot be represented by a round stroke, nor by an upright one, nor even by an angular one; no conventionalism will express a pine; it must be legitimately drawn, with a light side and a dark side, and a soft gradation from the top downwards, or it does not look like a pine at all. Most artists think it not desirable to choose a subject which involves the drawing of ten millions of trees; because, supposing they could even do four or five in a minute, and worked for ten hours a day, their picture would still take them ten years before they had finished its pine forests. For this, and other similar reasons, it is declared usually that Switzerland is ugly and unpicturesque; but that is not so; it is only that we cannot paint it. If we could, it would be as interesting on the canvas as it is in reality; and a painter of fruit and flowers might just as well call a human figure unpicturesque, because it was to him unmanageable, as the ordinary landscape-effect painter speak in depreciation of the Alps."
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