Jeff Botz
Himalayan Mountain Photographer
Everest Not Everest: A Dramatic Photo Essay and Plea for Honoring the Indigenous Naming Traditions of the World’s Tallest Mountain
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 the 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.
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 the 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.
“I’ve seen a lot of photography of natural wonders and little of it moves me. I suppose, like most of us, my sensibilities have been dulled by the National Geographic aesthetic of what I might call the “informative sublime.” Remarkably, the best of your[Mr. Botz] images transcend that model.”
John Coffey
Curator of American and Modern Art
North Carolina Museum of Art
Curator of American and Modern Art
North Carolina Museum of Art
This book is the historic first edition and first printing of this title. It is only available through this website. Every copy is signed by the author and numbered. This printing is a duotone edition in the high resolution 300 line screen quality so the photos are full tone and clear.
The photographer himself after crawling out of a hole he fell thru into a hidden crevasse at the 21,000+ foot level of Mt Everest in 2012!
At the Intersection of Ice and Awe
