Over the last decade behind his lens, Jon Griffith has focused on mountain sports photography: alpine, rock and ice climbing, backcountry skiing, BASE jumping, paragliding and speed riding. But beyond the dusky alpenglow and crisp ridgelines, the bulk of Griffith’s oeuvre is extraordinary in another important and more unusual way: it’s real. In his work he is an advocate for what he calls “honest” photography, eschewing industry-standard staged or reenacted shots. He uses his own technical mountaineering skill to access and shoot compelling photos of important ascents and descents as they happen. “[T]hat also goes with my views towards the heavy post-processing we see in images nowadays,” he told Alpinist.
That ethic is the fulcrum of his current project, which started out as a coffee-table book, but as he sifted through his body of work to make selects “it brought me back to so many climbs, emotions and adventures, and climbing friendships,” he says. “I felt that those feelings are an intrinsic part of my work–behind every shot there is often a huge amount of work or a great story of a real climb.” Griffith hopes to convey those stories in something like “a stunning scrapbook of what it’s like to do what I do.”
Speaking on Griffith’s ethic as an expedition photographer, Ueli Steck writes, “The one thing that will always be hard for me to accept is when we pack our bags and Jon puts in his heavy camera–I’m quite a stickler when it comes to keeping weight to a minimum, and my consolation for that now is in this book.”
What follows is a curation of Griffith’s alpine climbing work and the forward to his book.–Ed.
Almost exactly 10 years ago on a damp and cold morning I sat myself on a tandem with my housemate Jack Frost and cycled from Bristol in the West of England to Zermatt, traversed the Monte Rosa massif, and cycled back again. It was a time of change for me. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and six months later I held her in my arms as she took her last breath. I experienced grief on a level that I didn’t think I could ever experience–the 9-to-5 life that I had been gearing towards lost all meaning. But I took solace in the mountains of the Alps. It wasn’t so much escapism but somewhere I felt really strong for myself; personal time is a rare luxury nowadays and at that time I craved it. We live in an ever overpopulated and competitive society where we spend most of our lives worrying about how we look, which car looks coolest, and how big the new flat screen TV is. We place more value on material objects than we do on personal experiences but it doesn’t make us any happier.
The mountains to me represent a simple and basic place removed from all the human-created stresses and pressures of society. You create your own personal challenge, and that’s what I really like about alpine climbing–it has minimal competitiveness to it. One ascent can never be compared [to another], and the very nature of the mountains see to it that every ascent and every summit is different from the next. The mountains are a very honest stage; you can’t cheat your way up a big route, you can’t rely on the safety net of modern society; it’s just you and your partner and the climb ahead. It’s pure and very real and, because of that, it is one of the most genuine experiences that you can accomplish. In those moments of complete exhaustion you find a physical strength that you didn’t know existed, a mental head space you’d never explored, and a feeling of self satisfaction that you will never forget when you finally sit on the summit. As Greg Child put it, “People may say that alpinism is a fool’s game full of meaningless risk, and they may be right, but I climb because I thirst to throw back the margins of my world…I know that I am the best man I can ever hope to be precisely in those moments of maximum fear and doubt.”
The core values that form the foundations of our sport are values that I uphold in my work as well. I shoot as a climber not as a photographer. I like to shoot the real and honest truth behind climbing because at the end of the day photos can hide a lot as well. Technology has supplied us with ever-increasingly powerful software that allow us to alter and change images. In a place where you may find yourself at your most honest and genuine in life it seems sad when I see images taken that have been altered to make them more “poppy” and eye catching to the viewer.
If I think [back] to what really inspires me nowadays, it’s still the simple photos that tell a story. Alpinism is meant to be a tough game no matter what level you’re operating at, and for me capturing that true grit in an image without needing the “hyper reality” software effect is the holy grail. Take Marko Prezelj–he is without a doubt the world’s best alpine photographer as well as one of the most accomplished Himalayan climbers of our generation. What I love about his shots is that they don’t need glossy postproduction work to make them stand out from the others. Sometimes there are shadows that are too dark to see and there are highlights that are too blown to make out. But you don’t notice that because at the core of his photo is a human being pushing himself to a limit in an environment that few humans have ever been to–and his images speak volumes to that effect. A powerful image needs to have a powerful human touch to it, and thankfully that is something that post-processing can never replicate. Marko’s images have a timeless quality to them; they draw me in and make me instantly want to look the route and mountain up online.
But my work is also a product of those that I’ve climbed with. I owe all the images in this book to those that I’ve met…and shared a rope with along the way. This book isn’t just my work. They are my photos, but a photo of a climber on the North Face of the Jorasses is just a collaboration–he or she had to get there as well. There are a handful of climbers who I really owe a huge gratitude to. There have been pivotal partners in my time with whom I’ve steered towards a certain style of climbing or a certain style of photography and for them I am eternally grateful. My photography is constantly evolving and is a direct result of the alpine partnerships that I’ve had in the past and will have in the future. There is a reason why every climber is named in the caption in this book.
When I wanted to make a book about my last decade of climbing I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I wanted to keep true to the values of alpinism and to the people that I’ve climbed with. To that end all the images contained are real–these aren’t posed shots but honest moments captured that show a fleeting glimpse of a greater climb. The extended captions are there to help set the scene because sometimes it’s easy to forget that behind a split-second snapshot in time there may have been days of hard climbing just for that single moment through the lens, and for me that’s important.
I’ve been lucky enough to lead an incredible life over the last decade, which ironically was borne out of those unfortunate events 10 years ago and drove me to the mountains. Through the years I’ve met with certain climbers, famous and obscure, who shaped my future as a climber and photographer and who instilled a sense of ethic in my work that has resulted in the images that I take today. I hope that you enjoy this book. It has been a fantastic experience just delving back over 10 years worth of mountain adventures and reliving old memories with good friends. If there’s one thing that my life as a climber has taught me, it’s that there’s a beautiful world out there and I hope to keep shooting and sharing it with you for many years to come.
