Historical Badass: The First Great Mountain Photographer

In 1892, pioneering Italian mountain photographer Vittorio Sella was taking a long-overdue first trip to Great Britain, where a friend waited to help plan an expedition to the Caucasus Mountains and from which his agent had sold his work throughout Europe, but the English Channel crossing was rough and he stepped ashore nauseous and unsettled. Needing fresh air on the rail journey to London, he stuck his head out the window, with extraordinarily unfortunate timing, as the train was in a tunnel under the White Cliffs of Dover. Sella smashed his head on the tunnel wall, dislodging two bricks, and he tumbled backward in a pool of blood. The last thing he did before falling unconscious into a coma was to secure his coat collar against the cold.

Mont Blanc summit, July 1881. Vittorio Sella is at far right. If ever there was a person destined to photograph mountains, it was Vittorio Sella, born in 1859 in Biella, Italy, just thirty-five miles southeast of the summit