Appalachia

Summer/Fall 2009 Vol. LX NO. 2

Books of Note Book reviews

Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination

By Kenneth Hanson

Fields Publishing, North Truro, Massachusetts, 2008.

I90 pages. ISBN: 978-0-979059-70-4. Price: $85 (hardcover)

In 1986, at the age of 60, Kenneth Hanson undertook the first of a series of twelve treks in the Great Himalaya. He carried a 4x5 view camera, a wooden tripod, and cases of black and white film. His routes took him over passes as high as 18,363 feet into places seldom seen.

The extraordinary result is this book. Hanson has grouped his photographs by region, from the Karakoram in the west to the Kangchenjunga massif in the east. Between these mighty bookends are grouped images from Ladakh, Dolpo, the high drainages of the Kali Gandaki (Dhaulagiri and Annapurna) and the Khumbu (Everest area).

No less a part of the book is an ambitious essay on the history of Western engagement with the Himalaya. In compressed accounts of aesthetics, political history, native peoples and their religions, and mountaineering, Hanson provides an inquisitive reader with a comprehensive introduction to his huge subject. Another, shorter, essay brings us up to date on how the theory of plate tectonics plays out in Himalayan rock.

Hanson proposes, uncontroversially, that the essence of our reaction to mountains is astonishment. This is the leading edge of-all the curious and yearning emotions we bring especially to mountains as clouded with mystique as the Himalaya. There certainly is astonishment—and mystique—in these images. They exploit all the strength of the large for- mat: foreground and background impartially sharp convey a rarefied air; careful attention to texture in shadow and bright sun compensates for the obliterating glare in reality; patterns repeat in triangles of peak, snow slope, ravine, and penitente, and in the geometry of stone hamlet and barley field.

If you turn the book upside down, the abstract qualities become especially clear. Upside down is, of course, how the photographer viewed each scene beneath the camera shroud. With this equipment, each photograph is a deliberate act. Hanson believes that the very arduousness of the journey makes for a state of mind best suited to the reverential act of making a timeless image. Needless to say, he selects only the geologic or the truly indigenous for his subjects. No Gore-Tex, no hint of the polychrome tourist actuality is permitted to intrude on his transcendent vision. In this respect, he is even more austere than Vittorio Sella.

A photographer starts with subject matter. For this, one could hardly find anything more dramatic than the Karakoram. Even without clues to any human scale, Hanson conveys the remoteness, steepness, and relentless extent of these hard and frightening mountains. The most otherworldly image among many is the distant view of K2 over a snow saddle at dawn on page 29.

For relief from the power of the Karakoram, this first portfolio closes with human and animal subjects set in the deeply eroded volcanics of Ladakh. Lamayuru Gompa (page 38) surmounts its village like a mini-Potala Palace, exhibiting that battered Tibetan profile that helps stone buildings hold together when mountains shake. Concluding the group is a respectful and tender portrait of a coppersmith.

Each portfolio is a marvel. This is a book to pore over and to engage intellectually. This is indeed a pilgrimage that Kenneth Hanson has put into our hands.

—Malcolm Meldahl

Pages 153-4

Appalachia is a Journal of the Appalachian mountain Club