You may have detected from my previous blogs that I am reasonably unimpressed with what is currently available in terms of print media. I have ranted on at reasonable length, and what I think is wrong with them. If my inbox is anything to go by then I have also upset a few people people with my opinion.
What I want to do over the coming few weeks, as I suspect that this may well take a few blogs to get through, is take a look at climbing media across the ages. Now you have probably realise that social comment is not a strong point of mine. However I am in the position of having a reasonably large number of old magazines, I have already photographed and uploaded 150 covers from crags and mountain magazine’s.
I invite you to take a look through the shots and judge for yourself. Now I am not say that every single shot is better than much of what we see today. In fact there are a few totally out of focus, over/under exposed shots, so technically the occasional shot is little more than a snap shot that many people could probably take with their own camera’s or even there phone nowadays.
However generally the type of image is totally different, there are a large number of wider images that capture an almost Cleare-esque architecture to the rock. Putting the climber in context to whole route, rather than focusing on the climber. There are even some experimental images that work really well, not to mention pictures that deliberately work in landscape.
The one thing that is missing from these early forays in Mountaineering Journals is are the tag lines, and content description spread all over the cover image. In a way I think I like many of these images simply because they have a romantic, pure and innocent feel to them.
There are no logos, and if there are they aren’t the focus of the images, let alone repeated four or five times across the climbers garments and equipment!
I have picked out these two for social comment though, Ed February the first coloured climber to grace the front of a UK climbing magazine.
…and the first women? (I might be wrong here as I don’t have a complete set of magazines!)
