Note: It's odd to place one of my own photographs in juxtaposition to an essay about the passing of one of the great photographers of the past thirty years. It's even odder because Galen didn't particularly like my taste in images: he with his feet in the world of the born, me more firmly grounded in the world of the made. Nevertheless, I decided to include one that for sure nobody would mistake as a Galen knock-off, but perhaps one that he would have appreciated for what it is: one man's vision of the world he lives in.
Requiem for a Man Who Followed His Calling
Galen Rowell and his wife Barbara are dead, killed in a plane crash on August 11, 2002. Apparently the Aero Commander they were in tipped a wing and crashed while on final approach to Bishop Airport. All four passengers were killed instantly. The plane was being flown by Tom Reed who started the Life Flight service in Bishop, California and had been a pilot for over 30 years. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.
This is sad news.
Galen Rowell is not necessarily a household name, though you probably know who he is by the photographs he’s taken. As an artist/philosopher, Galen was a giant. Today, the catalog of Galen’s stock images exceeds 350,000 photographs. His work has graced the covers of numerous magazine covers, countless specials, and untold advertisements. He produced seventeen large format books of his photos and writing. You can see his images at http://www.mountainlight.com. You’ll recognize many of them.
From what I know, Galen
was born and grew up without any obvious sense or burden of what he was to
make his life’s work, or of the fame and financial success that was to
accompany it. He began climbing mountains at the age of ten on Sierra Club
outings, and made his first assents of the big walls in
Yosemite Valley when he was
sixteen. Over the next fifteen years he notched more than a hundred first
ascents—meaning he was the first to climb a wall or peak by a certain
route—there in Yosemite and in the High Sierras.
All of this climbing led naturally to photography. But what started as
an avocation, or perhaps an adjunct to his passion for wild places, became a
calling and then a shouting inner drive. In 1972 he sold his small
automotive repair business (his parents, a college professor and concert
cellist must have loved that career choice) to dedicate himself completely
to his calling, which some would say was photography, but others would tell
you was a call to awaken the human race to the wonder and fragility of
mother earth.
Less than a year later he completed his first major magazine assignment, a cover story for National Geographic. Since then, Galen has been all over the world—that’s usually a statement that’s offered as a rhetorical flourish, but in this case it is literally true—feeding his sense of wonder and adventure with epic ascents, descents, and crossings of some of the most forbidding and spectacular parts of the globe.
He climbed on Mount
Everest, K2 and Gasherbrum II. He made the first one-day ascents of Mount
McKinley in Alaska and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. He completed first
ascents Cholatse and the Great Trango Tower in the Himalayas.
He made the highest complete ascent and descent of a mountain on skis on
Mustagh Ata (24,757 feet). He was the first to complete the 285-mile winter
traverse of the Karakoram Himalaya. He’s been in far harrier situations than
landing a plane in Bishop California, so it’s odd that it is there—a
place that he loved, but nevertheless a very civilized place—that he should
find his death.
Galen’s gift and his contribution to
the collective consciousness was something he called “dynamic landscapes.”
Where other photographers have shown us breathtaking views of the natural
world—Ansel Adams is a name that most people would know—Galen pursued his
vision like the superb athlete that he was, taking his camera where most
people wouldn’t go, yet alone most photographers. He brought a landscape
painter’s sensibility to his adventure images, and a photojournalist’s sense
of dynamism to his soaring and heartrending landscapes. He was a pioneer. He
was an original. You don’t feel so much that you’re looking at a Galen photo
as that you feel like you are there with him in the photo.
I knew Galen only casually. I learned about him from his books and photos, and in 1998 decided to take a photo workshop from him. This led to a second advanced session a few months later. All told, I spent six days with him in the company of some number of others, all of whom were busy trying to be just like him. Just like I was. I wrote an essay on the eve of the first workshop I took with Galen that follows this piece.
There is no doubt in my mind that Galen was an extraordinary person, but not for the reasons you might think. Yes he was a superb photographer. Yes he was also a tremendous athlete: he had to be given the places he want and the things he did. Yes he became famous, at least in some circles, famous for doing something artistic, maybe even profound and important. Like his famous predecessors, he’s served the rest of the human race well by using his skills as a photographer and writer to draw our attention to the beauty and wonder of the world we live in, as well as the stupefying callousness with which we treat our shared home.
But to me, his greatness lies deeper and closer to the bone. Galen followed his bliss. He found his passion and pursued it. The fact that he became famous seems completely coincidental to that fact that he was a man that could say every day that he loved who he was and what he was doing. That he did it better than 99.9% of his peers—and he has few if any peers in the realm he chose—is further testimony to the power that motivates and illuminates anyone who has the courage to listen to the first faint inner callings and turn them into a life’s work.
We should all pay attention to this lesson: find something you really love doing, whatever it is, and become the best you can be at doing it. The rest will take care of itself.
I’m sad that Galen and Barbara are dead, though I guess I’m glad that they passed on together. I can’t really imagine the one without the other. She was in her way as extraordinary as he, and for all the same reasons.
But I’m grateful for the reminder their death offers anyone who will watch and listen. Tomorrow could be your last. Are you following your bliss? Have you heard and headed your calling? Have you loved enough? Have you made your little corner of the cosmos a better place for having been here? Are you leading the life you were meant to live? I knew two people who could answer yes and yes again. Now they’ve moved on. Who among us will take their place?
On Meeting Galen the First Time: December, 1998.
I wrote this essay shortly after taking my first Galen Rowell workshop
Many of my friends are aware of my raging obsession with photography. For those of you who have somehow missed this, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and money over the last 18 months trying to master some of the art and science of making good photographic images (sounds cooler than taking good pictures, doesn’t it?)
All of this actually has its roots thirty or so years ago when my grandfather bought me my first serious camera. I can vividly remember sitting on the couch in my parent’s house beside him as we practiced range finding different distances and discussed the intricacies of the hyper focal scale. Through high school and into college I took pictures with some modest degree of skill which is to say that the exposures were generally acceptable and I occasionally managed to not put the subject of the picture dead center in the frame.
Over the intervening years my interest in photography waned as other matters – like making a living to name one – took center stage. A trip to England a few years back rekindled my passion, which brings us in a round about way to the purpose of this missive.
This last weekend I had an opportunity to take a photography workshop with Galen Rowell here in the Bay Area. For those who don’t know, Galen is probably the top outdoor/adventure photographer in the world today, or certainly no worse than one of the top five. His adventures have taken him all around the world, and include numerous first ascents, descents, and circumnavigations. He’s published numerous books and his work is seen in all the right places: National Geographic, Sierra Club, etc., etc. It would be like taking a cello workshop with Yo Yo Ma or maybe a creative writing workshop with Toni Morrison.
As it turns out, Galen is a charming, modest, amusing fellow who I suspect is actually a bit shy and who goes out of his way to make you feel welcome. He has every right to act like a total prima donna given all he’s done and he just couldn’t be nicer or be less impressed with himself. His staff is equally accommodating and supportive and 15 of us wannabes spent a delightful three days in their collective company.
Let’s start with the good news. Galen is a superb photographer which is something I knew going in but didn’t really understand in anything more than an intellectual way. He’s got 300,000 images in his files and while you just know that not all of them are fine art quality, any one of us would have been happy to take something as good as his 299,995th image. On a bad day he’s awfully damn good. His best stuff knocks you out. Galen is also extremely knowledgeable of the art and science of making good pictures and is able to communicate a lot of his insight through his pictures, lectures, discussion, and field work.
The first session began with Galen showing some of his early work to establish a baseline. And in comparison to the images on the walls it wasn’t very good although I would defy any reader of this note to go do something even that good. Over the course of the first morning he illustrated how film sees, the use of ND filters, fill flash, and some basic Rowell-approved compositional concepts.
Knowing that we now knew everything we needed to make Galen grade pictures, the group headed up to Tilden Park to snap our little hearts away. Once there, Galen demonstrated a couple of techniques and then we scattered to be like him. Watching him is an instructive experience as he takes virtually nothing standing on level ground. He lies down, climbs around, scoots behind, and generally does anything he can to find a view that will help him get across a point of view. It should go without saying that he didn’t point his camera at the Golden Gate Bridge and just take a picture.
The looks on our faces the next morning as we reviewed our own work from the previous afternoon spoke volumes. This group of presumably competent picture takers was all running around with dark clouds over their heads and scarlet letter F’s on their chests. I was surprised at how much pressure I felt that afternoon to try and take something good, and then after awhile, to take something at all! Galen was kind, gentle, and pointed in his commentary on how to improve the slides he saw. So that we could all be equally humiliated, we each picked 10 slides which were then projected on this really gigantic screen. Nowhere to hide.
More lectures and discussion and then the next afternoon we were off to the Marin Headlands to try again. Terrific place to spend a late afternoon, and we all snapped away with a renewed sense of confidence that now we really could take pictures like Galen because we’d now been in the workshop the better part of two days. Unlike Tilden which was kind of dry and boring (sounds like sour grapes and it is), Rodeo Beach was lovely which if you think about it added even more pressure to take something worth projecting. Obviously some stupid beach, rock, or sunset picture wasn’t going to get it done with this group.
Happier looks accompanied us back to Berkeley that night as we all imagined the critical acclaim Galen would bestow on us the next day. And surprise of surprise, the quality of the collective body of work was dramatically improved in all respects. Galen doesn’t strike you as someone given to hyperbole and he felt that he’d seen perhaps as many as 20 images that were eminently publishable.
Now, the bad news. I was humbled. Big time. I tried to figure out how to blame my equipment and anything else I could think of but the fact is I came face to face with the fact that I have a lot to learn and a long way to go. I’m not even going to go down the path of comparing myself to Galen, although I feel certain I have a better jump shot and given his modest height, I know I could post him up and shoot over him (basketball now), all day long. But it was especially humbling to feel like I might not have even been in the top half of the group.
Back to the good news. I came away excited about all there is to learn and ready to burn a bunch more film trying to master what I learned. Proving that my obsession knows no bounds, I signed up for the advanced workshop on the spot and went home to peruse all my catalogs to see if there was some piece of equipment I didn’t own (some, but not a lot) against the possibility that there’s a magic lens or pill or something I can take to make me just like Galen.
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