About
Forces of Wonder
Unrivaled Photographs of the High Himalayas
Captured with 8"x10" View Camera
by Joan W. Lindley
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"Ansel Adams funded my darkroom" says Himalayan photographer Jeff Botz, "but he never knew it."
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In 1972, Jeff Botz attended an Ansel Adams exhibit on East 59th Street in New York City. After climbing a flight of steps and turning the corner, he entered the Witkin Gallery and came face to face with "Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park."
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At that moment, he was awestruck. "The potential for photography was expanded exponentially. I had no idea a photograph could be that powerful," says Botz.
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Thus began his journey.
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Botz's forty-six year (and counting) love affair with the high Himalayas began In 1972, just weeks before first meeting Adams, when he made a whirlwind ten-day trip to Kathmandu and snapped five rolls of 35 mm Kodachrome.
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In 1974, for the sum of $2000, Botz bought five framed Ansel Adams photographs from Witkin Gallery, the subsequent sales of which fittingly allowed Botz to follow in Adams' footsteps.
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Botz returned to Nepal in 1976, intent on capturing on film the forces of wonder that he had first witnessed in 1972. He spent four months trekking and photographing, once again with a 35 mm Nikon camera loaded with Kodachrome.
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"It was then," he says, "that I realized that the sacred Himalayan landscape was far too grand for the 35 mm format and that color film distracted from and diminished the potential expression the mountains offered."
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Three years later, in 1979, at the opening of the one-man show Ansel Adams and The West at the Museum of Modern Art, Botz once again came face to face with Adams' silver gelatin photographs.
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Dressed in a tuxedo at the black-tie affair, the young Jeff Botz briefly met Ansel Adams. He dared one question: "Sir, what do you think about the recent trend towards platinum and palladium printing?"
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Without a millisecond of hesitation, Adams replied, "Affectation. Affectation, pure and simple." Botz recalls shuffling away slack-jawed and speechless at the speed and conviction of Adams’ response.
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Twenty-two years after his 1976 expedition, Botz returned to the Everest region. After having worked with color daily for ten years as a dye transfer printer during this interim, Botz now fully embraced black and white photography, saying, "Color rarely serves the photo's essential message or improves its expressiveness."
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"I had come full circle," he continues, "back to the belief that black and white is the supreme form of the photograph, especially when one's photography is an attempt at expressing ultimate or universal truths."
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He continues, "I was raised in the New York City metropolitan area in an environment of hyperbole; I wanted to make photos of epic proportions and felt that was possible by marrying Adams' technique to the Himalayan landscape."
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Thus, in 1998, when Botz made his third trip to the Himalayas, even though common wisdom and practice prescribed carrying the smallest and lightest camera possible, in his backpack he carried a hand-built 8" x 10" view camera, multiple lenses, film, accessories, and a tripod, the total tipping the scales to 59 lbs. What mattered to
Botz was that this camera was capable of producing the highest resolution images ever made of Mt. Everest and the Everest region, thereby capturing the ineffable grandeur.
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During the month-long expedition, Botz exposed 61 frames of 8" x 10" film. When he returned home, he developed 60 sheets of film that were completely fogged. Somewhere in the middle of the group, one sheet developed just right. In fact, it was perfect.
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"I looked at that picture in amazement several times a day for minutes to hours at a time over the following months," Botz reminisces. "This picture assured me of one thing: everything I had hoped for was possible."
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Since then, on eleven return expeditions from 1999 to 2019, Botz has taken the only known photographs of the Everest region using a large format camera. The exquisitely printed results are hauntingly reminiscent of American masters Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
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On May 9, 2012, as Botz set up his 8"x 10" view camera at the 21, 854' level on Mt. Everest, he achieved the highest recorded deployment of such a camera in photographic history. He also reached a milestone in creating a comprehensive photographic survey of the world's tallest mountain and its surrounds, the body of which
grows with each return to the Everest region.
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To this day, Botz prints his unrivaled photographs of the high Himalayas using the silver gelatin techniques outlined by Ansel Adams. Pure and simple. No affectation.
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In 1996, Jeff Botz moved to North Carolina. He lives near Marshville in a distinctly Waldenesque setting. The sparsely furnished one-story wood frame farmhouse sits on a knoll, replete with a pond in the front and a garden literally outside the kitchen door. Cows graze adjoining pastures, and a car rarely passes on the gravel
road 100 yards away.
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Books and, of course, framed prints of the Himalayas define every room – even the kitchen where Botz added track lighting to illuminate prints he clamps to a reviewing board.
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Attached to the house is a former stable that Botz converted into a darkroom large enough to accommodate the massive enlarger he uses in the printing process. It is here, in the darkroom, that he meticulously makes silver gelatin prints. He recently printed a photo for a buyer thirteen times until he was satisfied.
"Photography is philosophy," says Botz, "sometimes an attempt at the resolution of an internal philosophical conflict, sometimes the expression of a deeply held philosophical belief. It is self-expression and autobiography, and when it succeeds, it reveals the beliefs that have driven the photographer to make the picture in the first place."
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Botz goes on to say, "I am not just making pictures for the media and graphic arts gristmill. I believe in something universally relevant in the austere and seemingly abstract designs of snow, stone, and sky in the high Himalaya."
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And amazingly, Botz, with his clunky camera, captures that something.
Botz's photography has been displayed in one-man shows at the Hickory Museum of Art and The Patan Museum in Kathmandu, and at a group showing at The Mint Museum in Charlotte. The Gregg Museum at NC State has one piece in its permanent collection, and the Mint Museum in Charlotte has two. He is the author of Portrait of Everest (2013) and Everest Not Everest (2016).
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In a letter to Botz, John W. Coffey, Deputy Director for Art and Curator of American and Modern Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, writes, "I've seen a lot of photography of natural wonders and little of it moves me. I suppose, like most of us, my sensibilities might have been dulled by the National Geographic aesthetic of what I
might call the 'informative sublime.' Remarkably, the best of your images transcend that model."
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In 2007, Lisë C. Swensson, Executive Director of the Hickory Museum of Art, wrote of Botz, "His images are unmistakably those of an artist who has spent more than thirty years physically and aesthetically exploring this extraordinary landscape that still holds the secrets of many cultures and generations, something no other artist has ever done with such power and grace."
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Indeed.
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- Essay written by Joan W. Lindley, Greensboro, NC