Vittorio Sella
in collaboration with the Sella Foundation
Location: Palazzo Guinigi, Via Guinigi, 29
Opening days and hours:
Monday – Thursday from 15:00 to 19:00
Friday – Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00
Sella Foundation presents a wide selection of modern prints from negatives made by Vittorio Sella during his 30 years in the high mountains. It is an excursus starting from the first photographs taken in the Biella mountains, and then moving on to those of the main Alpine and non-European groups he immortalised. A mountaineer photographer, he was among the first to introduce the practice of photography in the high mountains, producing images of great documentary and artistic value. In his photographs, the high level of quality is always evident, the skilful synthesis between aesthetic research and storytelling, the high technical skill, the balanced sense of perspective and dominant lines, the construction of the frame for articulated scenarios, with contrasts of light and dark, very fine gradations of tones and shades in the grey scale or particular shading and colouring. Vittorio Sella’s vision lies somewhere between positivism and a romantic feeling for nature. In him, love for art and the mountains, technical ability as a photographer and as a mountaineer merge and integrate into a single whole, from which derives the perfection of his work guaranteed by the use of large format negatives (30×40 cm and later 20×25 and 18×24 cm). As he himself wrote in 1890 after his first trip to the Caucasus: “Taking photographs in the Alps has greatly increased my love of mountains. Every day I have an eye on the various aspects of nature in the high regions and learn to better appreciate their beauty. The changing effects of light, mists, shadows remind me and make me feel the harmony of the sky with the earth’s landscape. I see the vision of a moment fixed on paper, I recognise scenes that I had not been able to admire in detail in real life […] Photography helps to choose, specify and even idealise the elements that can make up a beautiful alpine scene“.
BIOGRAPHY
Vittorio Sella, son of Giuseppe Venanzio Sella and Clementina Mosca Riatel, was born in Biella on 28 August 1859. At the age of 20 he took his first steps as a photographer based on the contents of Il plico del fotografo (1856), the first Italian treatise on photographic technique, written by his father. During that summer he took his first circular panorama from the top of Mount Mars, in the Alps above Biella. From then on, Sella combined his passion for photography with his love of the mountains, inherited from his uncle Quintino, statesman, mountaineer and founder of the Alpine Club in 1863. The Alps were his training ground on which Vittorio not only demonstrated remarkable mountaineering skills, but also achieved formal perfection in photographic technique. From 1889 he also turned his attention to the mountainous regions of the four continents. At first he organised and completed three expeditions to the Central Caucasus (1889-1890 and 1896) and the documentation he brought back earned him the Knight’s Cross of the Order of St. Anne conferred by Tsar Nicholas II and the Murchison Prize of the Royal Geographical Society. In 1897 Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, Duke of the Abruzzi, invited him to take part as official photographer in the expedition to Alaska, culminating with the first ascent of Mount St. Elias. In 1899 he documented the exploration trip to Sikkim around the Kangchenjunga massif, following the English mountaineer Douglas W. Freshfield. He made two more journeys in the retinue of HRH the Duke of the Abruzzi: the first in Ruwenzori in 1906, with the conquest of all its peaks, the second in Karakorum, where the ascent of K2 and Chogolisa was attempted. His photographs were widely circulated and were very successful even after his death in Biella in 1943. The entire corpus is today preserved at the Sella Foundation in Biella.
