A life’s work. Also: a survival work. However, it is probably not finished yet. Nevertheless, Jimmy Chin’s brilliant volume “Pictures from a World of Extremes” is fascinatingly self-contained, yes: complete.
The 49-year-old American Chin, son of Chinese immigrants, is a photographer, filmmaker, climber and extreme mountaineer. He should be known to most people as the director of the film “Free Solo”, which documents free climber Alex Honnold’s ascent of the almost 1000 meter high granite rock El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without a rope or other technical aids. “Free Solo” was awarded the Oscar for best documentary in 2019, among others.
Chin’s images are not only exceptional because he photographs from locations that are inaccessible to most people. Above all, they are outstanding because of their composition, the lighting conditions and perspectives as well as the selected detail. Some of Chin’s recordings have been on the covers of National Geographic and New York Times Magazine to see others have been im new Yorker and in Vanity Fair released.
The enduro corner of the freerider route up the face of El Capitan: Alex Honnold climbs it free.
(Photo: Jimmy Chin)
Six years before Jimmy Chin and his wife Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi filmed Free Solo, Chin was already touring Yosemite Valley with Alex Honnold. One of the photographs – she became a National Geographic-Cover – shows Honnold standing in Half Dome with his back to the rock, on the Thank God Ledge, a ledge just a foot wide, unsecured of course, and looking into the distance. How he got there, over the smooth rock, and how he would get further up is not really clear to you.
Of course, talent and ability, courage, hard training and meticulous preparation lead to climbing such walls in the best case. You can see it and yet you can hardly believe it. Jimmy Chin brings these achievements closer to you, makes them a little more comprehensible – through his brief texts, but above all through his photographs.
In his foreword, Conrad Anker writes: “The best photographs can capture feelings or transport us to a place that opens our minds and eyes and is therefore an impulse for our creativity and a deeply felt equanimity.” An excellent mountaineer and rock climber himself, Anker found the body of George Mallory on the north face of Mount Everest in 1999, who died in 1924 trying to become the first person to climb the world’s highest mountain .
Alex Honnold has been training at the Arch of Getu in China in preparation for the Free Solo Tour on El Capitan.
(Photo: Jimmy Chin)
Anker and Chin have embarked on many tours together, the first in 2001 slated to climb K7, a 23,000-foot “alpine fortress,” according to Chin, in Pakistan’s Karakorum. After sixteen days on the mountain – ten were planned, so the supplies were extremely scarce – the two and Brady Robinson had to give up, the storms were too wild, the avalanches were too violent.
Jimmy Chin was always in danger, that’s inevitable with this profession, with this vocation. Certainly he was also lucky, one does not always have one’s fate in one’s own hands in such extreme situations. However, he is not a gambler, this book is not boasting enough for that. Rather, humility speaks from the texts and images: before the forces of nature, the deep feelings in this misanthropic solitude, the privilege of being able to achieve and experience all this.
The Hand of Fatima is the name of this sandstone rock formation in Mali. Jimmy Chin accompanied Kevin Thaw and Cedar Wright on an expedition where they climbed all the towers that cast their shadows on the desert sands.
(Photo: Jimmy Chin)
He tries, writes Jimmy Chin, “to fill each image with a sense of place that hopefully conveys a sense of the whole.” In fact, there is a whole series of photographs that do exactly that: Be it in the Charakusa region in Pakistan with the bizarre rock formations Fathi Brakk and Parhat Brakk, be it on Kaga Tondo in Mali, a 760 meter high sandstone rock tower, be it on Shark’s Fin in the Mount Meru massif in India. At the best, Jimmy Chin draws you into his images, and you not only view them from the reader’s distance, it almost feels as if you are taking a position yourself on the ridge of Mount Everest, or halfway there Route up Ulvetanna in Antarctica.
Sometimes it’s people, extreme climbers like himself, who are the focus of Chin’s photographs. Most of the time, however, they become marginal figures, and it is the mountains that determine the character of the photographs. It’s about them, their beauty and the fascination they radiate. And not about any people who, to paraphrase Alex Honnold, crawl around inside them a bit.
Jimmy Chin: Images from a world of extremes. Translated from the English by Maria Meinel. Prestel-Verlag, Munich / London / New York 2022. 320 pages, 50 euros.