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VITTORIO SELLA. Country in west Uganda through which the Duke of the Abruzzi passed on way to the Ruwenzori Mountains, 1906, Sella number R 171-174. 11.4x54.9" gelatin silver prints, c. 1907, 4 panels, on 13x57.7" heavy brown paper. The Duke of Abruzzi with guides J. Petigax, C Ollier and J. Brocherel ascended the highest peak of the range at 16,763 ft. 5109 m. in June 1906 and named it Margherita Peak after the Queen of Italy. Various expedition members would climb together or in Sella's case he would climb separately to get the views. This was the second of three mountaineering expeditions Sella accompanied Abruzzi on, the others being the Mt. St. Elias (Alaska-Yukon) expedition of 1897 and the grandest of all to attempt to climb K-2 in the Himalayas in 1909. By 1906, Vittorio Sella by was not only the world's leading landscape and mountaineering photographer he was also one of the leading climbers of his time. At 5'6" he was what we now call an elite athlete, carrying his cumbersome equipment on numerous climbs in all seasons, making many first ascents world-wide while finding time and viewpoints for his transcendent images. When he began to photograph in the 1870s Sella mastered the wet plate process, then the dry plate process. He regularly photographed altitudes far higher than anyone in the world. Like Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins, he was both a legendary technician and print maker as well as a modern artist with his intent to make and exhibit prints in gallery, contests and exhibitions and interpret of the Mountain landscape as descriptive and emotive experiences, as art. The Collodion Silver paper he used had a richness not seen in American papers and in the 1890s he began making rich black and white gelatin silver prints. The European photographers had access to richer and more modern papers 20 years before American artists. He like William Henry Jackson was attracted to multi-plate panoramic views to capture the entirety of a mount range and glacial valley and made some of the most beautiful prints in this style in the History of Photography.