Making of ‘Mont Blanc, La Jonction’ (by Louis-Auguste Bisson and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, 1861), 2014

The story behind the photograph…

Louis-Auguste Bisson (1814–1876) opened a photographic studio in Paris in 1841, and soon afterwards his brother Auguste-Rosalie (1826–1900) joined him. The pair soon became well known as the ‘Bisson frères’, making celebrated images of Napoleon as well as of landscapes and architecture in Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. In 1861, Auguste-Rosalie became the first person to take photographs from the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. He had attempted the ascent in 1859 and again in 1860; now he returned, with a guide and a retinue of twenty-five porters to carry his cameras, photographic plates, chemicals and darkroom tent. He made his images using the wet-collodion process, and favoured unusually large-format negatives. His team battled the altitude, extreme cold, snowstorms and avalanches to reach the summit of the mountain on 25 July 1861. Bisson exposed three negatives. During the descent, he set up his equipment once again and posed members of the crew as if documenting their ascent. The Bisson brothers’ images of local scenery and buildings proved very popular with both the general public and scientists, who were eager for accurate depictions of previously little-documented territories.