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This book is a classical photo essay about the Himalayas but even more than that it is a love letter to those mountains, the people and culture of the land surrounding the world’s tallest mountain. This is not another collection of travel, documentary or adventure photos but a personal, poetic visual response to one of ther world’s most dramatic landscapes.
The photos in the collection were made with the same large format film technology that was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to illustrate the untamed American west and other remote lands around the world. Unfortunately that Era of Exploration photography could not access the Himalayas because the borders of Nepal and Tibet were closed to all foreigners so the classic photos were never made. I started this photo mission using the 35mm color format but found it too reductionistic to capture and express the majesty and grandeur of the mountains or the aura of spirituality which has characterized the area since time immemorial.
Working particularly in the style of Ansel Adams using black and white film and the clunky 8x10” film camera, I have strived to create landscape photographs that transcend documentation and travelogue. Like the great masters of the two dimensional mountain imagery, Caspar David Friederich, Albert Bierstadt, Frederich E. Church and Ansel Adams, it is my intention to invoke associations and metaphors of inspiration, personal challenge, struggle, achievement and self realization as well as suggest these mountains as forget-me-nots of the Creator /Universal Life Force.