What Authors and Artists are saying about Inside the High Sierra
“Nobody captures the haunting majesty of High Sierra like Claude Fiddler.”
Sarah Malarkey: Former Executive Publishing Director, Chronicle Books
“Incredible book, my friend! It takes a lifetime to accrue such a mature perspective, but by then not many can articulate it.
Claude, your book reminds me of the van Gogh museum. I went to Amsterdam just to see them, but after a few canvasses ran out into the street. Their light was that intense. I recast my trip, staying over to return to them. Inside the High Sierra I got to Plate 13. Tomorrow I’ll be back. Thanks for your vision, Man!
Claude and I met as climbers but have lingered nearly half a century as artists. So, I’m driven to ponder. For instance, in your wonderful portrait of North Palisade — framed by distance as few have seen it since the view in1902 that inspired its first ascent — did you notice, Claude, seen below as if forming a proscenium are two intermediate-elevation buttresses? Probably. Quite alluring, yet I’m betting they have been ignored. But now, having been glimpsed, they will propel me, lugging rope and hardware, deep into Sierra backcountry to adore them closely. Wanna come?”
Doug Robinson: Writer, climber, and seer of the High Sierra. Author of A Night on the Ground A Day in the Open
“Fiddler has not only captured the essence of the High Sierra backcountry, he has included in this splendid book an array of Sierra writers and artists to complete the picture of what so many of us regard not only as the Range of Light, but also the Gentle Wilderness, a term not too old but entirely accurate.”
Steve Roper: Founder and Editor of the journal Ascent, author of Camp 4 Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber
“In this intimate and revealing declaration of one man’s ongoing love affair with that range of light known as the Sierra Nevada, Claude Fiddler brings together a diverse collection of thoughtful essays, elegant pen and ink drawings, and an informative series of narrative captions to accompany his own extensive catalog of color photographs gleaned through thirty-five years of dedicated exploration and introspection while venturing Inside the High Sierra.
Of particular note is the way in which Fiddler has deftly woven a tale of gathered inspiration and steadfast devotion to his chosen subject through what, at first, might seem a rather eclectic variety of externally generated testimonials and visual insights. Yet, when taken as a whole, Inside the High Sierra reveals a singular vision of unquestionable allegiance to, and affinity for, the very land that it so passionately describes and celebrates. And it does so in a way that is both visually attractive and intellectually engaging.”
Huntington Witherill: photographer and author of Orchestrating Icons
“Photography is a unique art form, at least in the way it is commonly practiced.
Painters, actors, sculptors, dancers, performance artists can do whatever they please including simply tacking a canvas to a wall or sitting in a chair for a year or picking up buckets of paint and throwing them against a wall.
A realist or pointillist painter has it a bit harder. There is a constraint in the technique that may be very difficult, but the final work can be anything, including smearing the pointillist spots.
Photography is different and by photography, I mean a subject captured on film or on a digital chip. In Claude’s case, the subject is the landscape and that is its own set of rules and problems.
Something must be in front of the camera and that something must be found. The finding can be as easy as the backyard, the park across the street or as difficult as the South Pole. But a landscape photographer usually begins with a visceral response to something seen, and that will likely be before photography becomes a pursuit.
For a photographer, attempting to create a body of work enough for a great book is a series of challenges. Some images are gifts in that they are moving and beautiful. The composition is all made, and the photographer’s job is to not make mistakes and so to not miss taking the gift home, but such gifts are rare.
Most landscapes are complex, the image needs to be coaxed out which usually means various lenses, distances, angles, waiting for the light or simply framing the image properly. This part is what takes talent for the photographer must see the image in his or her imagination, although it may not be there to capture until some work is done. It is seeing the potential and then coaxing it, so it looks like what was imagined. There are no hard and fast rules. But it does require an ability that is built over time.
All the variables: light, time of day, whether, and the general state of the subject can vary essentially infinitely. Which leaves three options: settle or move on and return at another time or day.
I suspect that Claude either keeps moving or returns as often as he has to. Has chosen the latter and it requires a kind of metaphor for a ladder which Claude has made more complicated by not settling for 8″ x 10″ prints. In the earlier part of his career this meant hauling a 4″ x 5″ view camera up the side of a mountain.
Now I have carried this kind of camera and I remember vividly my one and only visit to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. What confronted me was a gradually rising slope of large boulders. I am not pleased to be high up in the first place, but the boulders might just as well have been the Grand Canyon. I was neither an athlete nor a climber and that eliminated a large part of the world.
Claude is both. I trekked in the woods with a compact studio on my back (or just drove around) but taking even minimum gear up a steep rise or long hikes into Alaska and then composing, focusing (which is a three-point business with a view camera), well, I don’t know how he did it, but of course that is not the end of it. Every challenge facing the visitor to the iconic subject must be dealt with here: light, wind, mist, rain, etc. with the complication that moving is a whole new challenge.
Then, of course, you must decide when to stop looking and to start composing which despite the climb or hike is still the most difficult part. That happens because of a very human trait of not seeing what we are looking at. If you practice by shooting and viewing the results often enough you may get better at it, but not necessarily. I stopped my photography twenty or so years ago and am still finding images I overlooked, because I can feel the image better now. If you are lucky, and Claude must be, the seeing is emotional as well as analytical, and something vibrates inside while the mind analyzes.
So, what is the bottom line, all of the above plus dedication, the simple extra mile, except in Claude’s case, that may be straight up.
Oh! Yes. One more thing. A photographer could choose to repeat a week’s long trek, but in this case, there was a client or a book title. Same difference. Given that it is a book it will likely be a collection of some (one or more images) plus enough new images to satisfy the mission of the book, and that is a challenge from one to infinity. Remembering what has been done and then finding a number of new images in excess (two, three, four times) of the number needed.
Doing this (having done a much easier version) now requires something new: a kind of documentation of the area yet with each image a work of art. So, one starts off without a clue what one will find no matter how familiar the territory. Then the problem is a very common one and that is to see. Others look, but artist sees. It seems trivial, but it is the heart of the mission, to forget what is in memory, or expectation, or (this is the though one) what one hoped for. Claude being Claude will continuously see; that is, respond in heart and soul to the scene before him for that is his business as a photographer and I can attest to the fact that not seeing one can be fooled by pieces of an image and waste a great deal of film, or memory chip.
Now the rubber meets the road. After seeing, comes a demand to see all there is both good and bad what one finds on the ground glass or view finder.
The first requirement must be satisfied, a visceral reaction, an internal metaphor that begins to sing and the pieces are there to make a visual song. They may be rhythms, color palettes, textures, clouds, etc. but if the artist has done an artistic work then the image is nearly complete.
So, take a look. Does your heart sing (as mine does)? because a new melody has been born and the final effort of composition is to the make the best of what is already great because the trail one has chosen is magical.
I cannot help but think this sounds like a lesson in photography and in some sense it is. But I find that is the only way to critique, to understand what comes before puts one in a position not just to smile, but that it is a knowing smile, and I think knowing in two ways: the nature of the road and its obstacles, physical and mental, and the recognition of a piece of art. For me the best I can say it that it is butterflies in the tummy. Silly? Yes, to some, but magic to those in the know. One then just must recognize the species to know which chapter and page in the book it will occupy.”
John Wawrzonek: photographer of The illuminated Walden In the Footsteps of Thoreau
“Loving a place is easy; capturing its essence is something else entirely. In this gorgeous book, Fiddler reveals the wonders of light, highlighting the Sierra’s many textures and moods. His photographs offer a decades-long study in paying attention, one stunning, thoughtfully conceived frame at a time. The essays that accompany the images, from harrowing climbing tales to meditations on the properties of granite, give voice to the transformative and ultimately fragile nature of this landscape.”
Caroline VanHemert: author of The Sun is a Compass
“Inside the High Sierra is a luminous glimpse into what Claude Fiddler calls a “…restless uncertainty that I was in an unfamiliar reality.” His photographs are exquisitely crafted, in turns as subtle or as dramatic as they should be. They express an infatuation with the outer and inner landscapes he’s spent a lifetime exploring. So, too, do the essays that accompany this visual banquet. “I could see Half Dome and the beach at Tenaya Lake where I grew up swimming,” writes Fiddler’s daughter, Lauren. “This could be enough, I thought.” Would that we were all able to so directly experience the acute love of place celebrated in this sumptuous book.”
Michael Kennedy: Former Publisher and Editor of Climbing Magazine
Up Cathedrals of Rock and into Stillness
“The artist is born out of natural passion. For Claude Fiddler this is undeniably the case. What kind of love powers you up Mt Everest, or over many of our own 10,000 foot peaks
carrying more than 20 extra pounds of just tripod, view camera, lens and accessories, not to mention the normal camping gear? This is the measure of an immense love which you see illuminated in his imagery.
Though the Sierra “Range of Light” now is his chosen back yard, access to her hidden treasures of beauty are not just out the door, but over hard grueling trails. It would turn many the curious artist to a different less challenging path. The key to Claude’s vision is a deep love of the path, its spacious freedom and the inspiring prospect of where it leads. As viewers we have been blessed as it has brought him into the presence of these wondrous cathedrals of light.
Art is the sublime residue of effort and passion. There is no richer source of passion than what the heart beholds in the stillness of nature. The natural world is the perfect polished mirror where beauty, nobility, and perfection are recognized which, of course, only reflects our own noble human and creative potential. Every artist responds to a different calling. It is clear that Claude, following in the footsteps of Muir and others, has found his refuge in the stillness and luminous presence of aeries of rock and light.
He’s a devotee of that evocative spacious light. His pilgrimages into the craggy reaches of our world celebrate not only the topography of our planet but the geology of our shared human spirit.
The work invites viewers to behold visions of wonder from this world, but more to explore what is touched within. We come to sense the majesty of the world doesn’t come only up exhausting mountain trails but waits for us also within our own luminous space of attentive awareness.”
Steve Solinsky: author Of Stillness and Light Photographs, Mystery, & Awakening the Spirit
“The images in this book harken back to the coffee table book collectables that ran for several decades beginning in the 1960s, when the Sierra Club issued the breath-taking photography of such lensmen as Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams in order to promote wilderness preservation. Like those works (a lineup which also featured Claude Fiddler’s 1995 The High Sierra: Wilderness of Light), Fiddler again brings us up and Inside the High Sierra with his masterful images of a timeless landscape.
This time around, after nearly four decades of chasing light and climbing peaks, always looking for that most elusive of images, Fiddler has clearly perfected his vision. No doubt it is all about his immersion and interaction with the High Sierra—a place that he has single-mindedly dedicated himself to in a labor of love. When he takes out the camera and tripod, he has already seen the image that he wants to create, with balanced movement, exquisite light and an intuitive sense of composition.
Seen as a whole, the images offer up an enduring statement of the sanctity of wilderness. Beyond the reach of roads and unsullied by humankind, showing us inviolate nature at its finest moments, Claude Fiddler has created a work of art.”
Jon Waterman author of Atlas of the National Parks