THE SUBLIME
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WALTER BONATTI
Revisiting the fearless and free life of Walter Bonatti
He explored his limits and pushed beyond them. Then he recounted that magical state of ecstasy that he called the sublime. A mountaineer, photojournalist, writer and public speaker, solitary and invincible, Walter Bonatti was the last Italian hero of the pre-TV era. He climbed the toughest mountains and ventured to the remotest places, as if each were a different world. Driven by a thirst for wonder and new beginnings, he fulfilled his dreams and inspired those of others. And still today, we can be swept away by his adventures.
When it was clear to everyone that he was the world’s greatest climber, he gave it all up and made a fresh start. Three years later, searching for a predator in the wild, he fell in love with an ant and convinced us that it was worth it.
In the autumn of 1968, Walter Bonatti arrived in Indonesia on a journey that would take him from Sulawesi to Java, from Komodo dragons to the crater of Krakatoa, via an interminable tiger “hunt” in the jungles of Sumatra. His photo reports, published in Italy by the weekly Epoca, were immensely successful and his popularity soared to new heights. Just a few years earlier, in 1965, he had put an end to his extraordinary mountaineering career on the Matterhorn and turned to something different. In those first three years as a photographic correspondent, he crossed the Klondike and the Yukon in the footsteps of Jack London, travelled in East Africa on the trail of Hemingway’s escapades, climbed the Peruvian Andes and sailed the Orinoco. Video cameras and colour TV had not yet weakened the appeal of large-format photography, and the world had not yet shrunk under the pressure of mass tourism. Of course, the epic feats of truly heroic explorations were long in the past, but people’s curiosity and fascination was stilled aroused by the allure of faroff lands. With his self-timer images of such forbidding places – which he mostly visited in solitude – Bonatti didn’t produce simple documentaries, but photographic stories with a strong, handsome and courageous protagonist. In this way, he inspired the dreams of readers both young and old, just like he had ignited people’s passions in the previous 15 years by climbing the sheerest walls of rock and ice.
His list of mountains was certainly outstanding: the Grandes Jorasses, the Grand Capucin, the Dolomites, K2, the Petit Dru, Gasherbrum IV, Rondoy North, the Matterhorn... In the 1950s and 1960s, while climbing the 8,000-metre peaks of the Karakorum and the Alps, or his beloved Mont Blanc or the Andes, Bonatti experienced triumphs and tragedies, exaltation and disappointment. Encountered in adolescence, the mountains had been his first source of adventure, as well as the cheapest. Indeed, for someone like him who lacked resources, these Alpine excursions were the only affordable option beyond exploring the flat horizons of the Po Valley. And mountaineering, a sport without rules, was perfect for an independent spirit like his. Struggling with wartime poverty and hardship in childhood, Bonatti grew up without really putting down roots.
He learnt to make a virtue of self-reliance. It was a character trait, a spiritual need. But the mountains also enabled him to spread his wings. In 15 years of spectacular climbs, he won enough fame to be able to take flight once again, when he began to feel stifled by the human environment of those very same mountains. Loneliness, misunderstanding and envy were the inevitable price to pay for a man with such immense talent and integrity, and no desire to become entangled in conventions and routine. In his last years as a mountaineer, there were reignited controversies overshadowing the conquest of K2 in 1954, an expedition that had been marred by infamy and lies. It was time for him to change his surroundings and follow his desires elsewhere.
Extreme mountaineering also taught him to gauge his skills, to balance courage with humility, to use his imagination without losing concentration, to focus on details as a way of controlling the unpredictable. He knew that ultimately it is nature that decides. “Mountains are bigger than you. If they say no, you’re nothing at all.” Bonatti effectively transferred the strengths and skills he had refined in the mountains to his travels and search for new frontiers that could test his mettle. It was this (among other things) that connected his career as a climber with his vocation as a correspondent and explorer: his search for extreme situations, out of reach for ordinary mortals, where he could seek space, sensory experiences, introspection and freedom. “We’re frightened by what we don’t understand,” he wrote. “So I do my best to understand, and in that way I keep my fear under control.”
Endowed with an exceptional physique, Bonatti continued to fulfil his dreams and nurture those of others with his stories and photographs. His choice of destinations was initially guided by the books he had read as a boy. Then he increasingly ventured to places that would confront him with the “other”. And so much the better if it was a tribe untouched by progress, enabling him to imagine the primordial earth, to communicate instinctively, and unarmed, with wild creatures. He immersed himself in the world to bring out a lost or forgotten part of himself. These were his explorations.
All this will be the subject of an exhibition to be held in early 2021 at the Museo Nazionale della Montagna (National Mountain Museum) in Turin, which holds the immense Bonatti archive. Consisting of hundreds of thousands of images, memoirs, letters and documents, in autumn the archive will be open for consultation after a patient (and unfinished) effort at digitalisation. The exhibition will focus on the relationship between Bonatti and his “states of grace”, as he called them, referring to the hypnotic moments of communion with the mountains in extreme situations, the experiences of empathy with wild animals and total immersion in the natural environment. Almost more important objectives than the adventure itself were the concept of the “sublime” (in the sense of “reaching the limit”, which was another of Bonatti’s recurrent phrases), and experiencing travel as a metamorphosis and new awareness. Bonatti still has plenty to tell us about this and much more, many years after his exploits and almost ten since his death.
With this in mind, from his writings we have chosen Sumatra. This 1958 account of his attempt to photograph a tiger might simply be the record of a missed encounter, a failure, an unsuccessful adventure. After all, in those 40 days of “hunting”, nothing (or almost nothing) happened. Bonatti searched for the tiger, caught a glimpse of it, but was unable to photograph it, to immortalise it on film. It is therefore the story of an absence, like lying in wait for a ghost. But his point of view was overturned. Resigned to failure, Bonatti focused his gaze closer at hand and spent whole days writing about what he saw, touched and heard: monkeys, birds, insects, rain, silence, snakes, bird calls, leaves, the wind... And ants. Around him he saw a circumscribed but wonderful world. And he recounted it as a discovery, because that’s what it was. Many years later he explained it even more clearly. To experience an adventure and explore ourselves, there is no need to travel to the ends of the earth. All you have to do is relinquish easy comforts and put yourself to the test, immerse yourself in the environment and be receptive to a sense of wonder. Look around to see inside yourself. He shows us that this can still be done, even though the world is no longer the one that he knew. Then again, it’s no longer the world that we thought we knew either.