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Indepth Arts News:
"View from Above: The Photographs of Bradford Washburn"
1999-11-24 until 2000-04-30
Museum of Fine Art
Boston, MA,
USA United States of America
Mountaineer, explorer,
cartographer, and for forty
years director of Boston’s
Museum of Science, Bradford
Washburn is also a brilliant
aerial photographer who has
been making “views from
above” of high mountain
peaks and glaciers since
1934. Washburn, born in
1910, began climbing in the
French Alps when he was
sixteen years old. As climber
and mapmaker, he is
particularly identified with
Mount McKinley and the
Alaska Range, but he has
also mapped with his camera
the Grand Canyon.
While
Washburn’s photographs
were made primarily for
documentary purposes, they
can also be appreciated for
their surprising, often
dizzying spaces; for the
intricate interplay of light and
shadow over pristine blankets
of snow; and for their
revelation of natural textures and patterns of startlingly abstract beauty.
Not all of Washburn’s photography is airborne. The many Alaskan expedition albums
he has put together since the 1930s contain carefully sequenced picture essays that
detail the organization of supplies or camp conditions. The albums also contain
portraits of expedition members, including his wife, Barbara, who has been a key
participant in many of the major climbs and mapping expeditions. The some
eighty-five prints in the exhibition, selected from literally thousands of negatives made
from the 1930s to the 1990s, are a generous and welcome gift to the Museum from
Bradford and Barbara Washburn. The exhibition is complemented by a newly
published book on Washburn’s
mountain photography which is
available in the Museum Bookstore &
Shop.
No matter how strange and unfamiliar
geologically or how abstractly
patterned Washburn’s aerial images
may be, one thing they are not is flat.
They are bold relief images captured
in extreme, raking light—the earth
becomes a living relief map sculpted
by the light with magical precision.
Perhaps the central visual message of
Washburn’s aerial photographs is the
revelation of how the earth works. This
is at once good science and
expressive art. All the earth’s
secrets—its geological movements,
its upheavals and erosions, the slow
march and retreat of glaciers, the
essential interconnectedness of the
earth’s bones, veins, and
muscles—are laid out before us with
exemplary clarity.
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