mer de glace

L Punton, approaching storm, Mer de Glace, July 2007

..without knowing where to spot them, one perhaps would not realise that there is actually a group of people out on the ice in the middle of the picture who are on an alpine skills course to learn how to traverse glaciers and to get out of crevasses. The sense of scale is entirely deceptive.

detail of above showing location of walkers.

A few minutes later, the entire valley would be filled with cloud hugging the glacier, heavy rain and powerful winds.

See also my previous post on Ruskin's photographs of the mer de glace to see how much the great sea of ice has shrunk.

Switzerland with a Baedecker

I've not been out in the hills as much as normal lately (see previous post..) so have been looking through some of my books on mountains for my only fix. The fold out images from my Baedecker's guide to Switzerland are quite fantastic, so I scanned them a couple of weeks ago with a plan to do something with them. Still in progress, but here are two panoramas.

There are a good deal more in this fabulous book, and the one with the Mer de Glace is particularly fine. Having travelled to Chamonix, France a few summers ago, the mental travel of the Baedecker is proving really very enjoyable.

Ruskin and photography

Some years back, I found this image by Ruskin of the 'Mer de glace, Chamonix'. It's one of the earliest photographs ever taken in the Alps. Ruskin made many historic early daguerreotype photographs in the 1840's and 1850's. However, in his Lectures on Art (1870) Ruskin expressed warnings for the use of photography and argued that it had a negative impact on art:

Let me assure you, once and for all, that photographs supersede no single quality nor use of fine art, and have so much in common with nature, that they even share her temper of parsimony, and will themselves give you nothing valuable that you do not work for. They
supersede no good art, for the definition of art is ‘Human labour regulated by human design’.

His original enthusiasm for photography arose out of it's mechanical aspect, however, and the media’s ability to deliver images with minimal involvement of human labour seems to be the very quality that impressed Ruskin deeply in his first contacts with daguerreotypes.