Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed (1860 - 1934), also known as Aubrey Le Blond, was one of the first female filmmakers. She shot at least 10 films and, more importantly, she was the first person—at least that we know of—that shot films about mountaineering and winter sports.
At her time, it was highly unusual to be a woman and a mountain climber, but she was. There was no mountain equipment or clothes for women, so she climbed in a skirt. She loved the mountains so much that she even founded a women's alpine club in Switzerland. She conquered several peaks that no one had climbed before and published seven books on mountaineering.
When she went to the mountains, sometimes alone, she used to take photographs. Those photos are so striking that some of her contemporaries considered them unique. She developed and printed the images herself, often in extreme conditions:
“When I got my first camera, a very cumbersome concern … on a stand … I had to learn everything as best I could. The Chamonix photographer gave me hints, and his advice as to developing was ‘develop till the plate is as black as a mortal sin!’ It was trying work setting up a camera with half-frozen hands, hiding one’s head under a focusing cloth which kept blowing away, and adjusting innumerable screws in a temperature well below freezing-point. But one learnt one’s job very thoroughly and I confess that even now I never feel satisfied unless I have done all the developing, printing, etc., of an exposure … myself.”
She took thousands of photos which were included in publications and conferences, offered as prizes in sporting competitions, and sold to help charities.
A bit later, she also started to make films, we do not know exactly when or why. Unfortunately, in her diaries, she does not mention her films, but it seems that they were not just a hobby, or domestic films, because some of them are listed in commercial catalogues.
All of her catalogued films were shot in Switzerland. She shot mountains, but also winter sports, as I already mentioned, such as ice skating and sledge racing. Sadly, all of her films have been lost; maybe that is the reason why she is not more well-known.
As you can imagine, she was an upper-class woman. In 1900, it was unusual to have access to photo cameras, let alone film cameras, but it is curious that her hobbies were so far from the norm at a time when a woman could not even walk alone in the city. She was completely aware of this problem, she talked and wrote about it on numerous occasions:
“The chief reason why women so seldom climbed fifty years ago was that unless they had the companionship of a father, brother, or sister, it was looked at as most shocking for a ‘female’ to sleep at a hut or a bivouac.”
“Many men…are not enthusiastic about women climbers at all; and, perhaps, would rather be without us.”
“…I had to struggle hard for my freedom. My mother faced the music on my behalf when my grand-aunt, Lady Bentinck, sent out a frantic S.O.S. ‘Stop her climbing mountains! She is scandalizing all London and looks like a Red Indian’”.
Apparently, her grand-aunt was sexist and also racist… One funny detail is that Hawkins-Whitshed was so upper-class that the first time she went climbing she didn’t know how to put on her own boots, and she was not sure on which foot should go which boot. She had always been shoed by a maid and she did not know how to do such basic stuff.
Later, she learned to be independent and realised that people do not need servants. It is hard for me to imagine that you can be so rich that you do not even know that most people do not have servants. Anyway, it seems that she really learnt to be independent because she served as a nurse during the First World War, and her many adventures took her to Asia, America, and the Norwegian Arctic.
Obviously, all this was possible because she was rich. Being an independent poor woman her life would be completely different. I do not know if at that time it was even possible to be poor and independent. It is not really possible even today.
Class considerations aside, her images are stunning. You can find many of Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed photographs here.
Before the collapse of Mont Blanc
If Hawkins-Whitshed was alive today, she would probably be somewhere campaigning for climate change awareness. Many of her photographs and films were shot in the Alps, and when writing about her I kept thinking of some contemporary art pieces that talk about the melting of the glaciers and the collapsing of mountains.
The first one that came to my mind is Avant l'effondrement du Mont Blanc by Jacques Perconte, because the Alps are one of the places where Hawkins-Whitshed climbed most often.
“Dedicated to the eponymous Mont Blanc massif, the film is accompanied by the burning question of whether we happen to be the very last people who will ever have the chance to see Mont Blanc’s summit. It’s all in response to the earth’s rising temperatures, which is causing glaciers to melt at a rapid pace.”
Perconte is a French digital artist and avant-garde filmmaker that works a lot with encoding and reverse engineering, often generating glitches. He explains that when you’re in the Alps it is impossible to ignore the falling of the cliffs. The Mont Blanc is iconic and a touristic place, but it is also dangerous, not only because it is a high mountain, but because it is falling apart.
Hawkins-Whitshed’s films are lost, Perconte’s film is collapsing. Nothing is permanent.
The sound of glaciers melting
In 2007, Katie Paterson recorded sound from three glaciers in Iceland—Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, and Solheimajökull—and pressed them into ice records made using the meltwater from each corresponding glacier. These ice albums were played simultaneously until they melted completely.
This is one of my favourite pieces about climate change. The action is poetic, but the idea of glaciers melting because of us is horrific, and I am fascinated by art pieces that use that strange dichotomy between horror and beauty.
A related sound work made around the same time is Calling the Glacier by Kalle Laar. In this interactive piece, you could call a glacier to have a chat with it. Of course, the glacier did not talk, but you could listen to its sounds.
This was part of Call me!, a series that researched sounding signals of nature phenomena caused by climate change.
These two sound pieces were made in Iceland and Austria, but Hawkins-Whitshed’s Swiss landscapes have been also recorded by sound artists worried about climate change. Ludwig Berger has an ongoing work about the Morteratsch glacier—Melting Landscapes—in the Swiss alps. He has been recording the glacier since 2016.
Another work that talks about similar issues, but more focused on the data, is Herald/Harbinger by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp.
Rubin and Thorp show the relationship between human activity and glaciers. Their artwork visualizes a glacier’s real-time perturbations juxtaposed against the trajectories of nearby pedestrians and vehicles. This piece is more abstract, so maybe if you see it without any contextualisation is not obvious what is it about, but there are thousands of different ways to talk about current issues.
Have you ever been in front of a glacier? I am from a region of Spain in which we do not even have high mountains and I have not travelled much, but once I was in Iceland, because one of my cousins was living there for a year. It was overwhelming. I only have a few Polaroid photos, because it was years ago and I did not have any other camera, but it is the closest I have ever come to the Sublime.
Another week, another newsletter… This is one of my old Iceland Polaroids.
If you've made it this far, I assume you've been interested enough to give me a bit of publicity. This newsletter is free, but it’s quite a job, so if you feel like share it, that would be nice.
You can find more about my own artwork at null66913. If you are an upper-class person with money, like our week’s main character, you can spend your fortune buying flickering videos and noise at my shop, that would be a great support for me. Small tips are also welcome.
Sometimes I do not know if my English is good enough to write this kind of content, but I hope my writing is not very weird :)
See you next week! Let’s hope… I never know if I would have enough free hours and energy to write, but I’m trying.
Thanks for reading this.