"The Alpine Foot and...
"The Alpine Foot and...
The Alpine Foot and the Climbing Arm.“To begin with the foot of an infant, we notice that the foot, like the hand, is all adapted for climbing. Dr. Luis Robinson has shown that the infant’s handgrip is so strong, that the whole weight of its body can be borne by the prehensile power of one hand.”1 ‘The Alpine Foot and the Climbing Arm’ connects – fingers to toes as were ‐ two somewhat eccentric and idiosyncratic climbing texts: “Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot” (1896), by the Victorian surgeon and Alpinist, George Wherry, and “Master Of Rock: The Biography of John Gill” (1977), by Pat Ament. Both works were much ridiculed (in the climbing press) at the time of publication, and the actual carry‐over into climbing, from Wherry’s findings on the ‘Alpine Foot’ and Gill’s practice of one‐arm, one‐finger pull‐ups, is virtually nil. In the late 1890s Wherry ‐ an amateur mountaineer, surgeon by profession ‐ set out to prove that the feet of Alpine guides were somehow especially physically developed (evolved) to cope with the slopes! He carried out experiments ‐ made measurements, took photographs ‐ made tracings even; collected an enormous amount of data concerning the feet and ankles of some of the most famous climbing guides operating in Switzerland during the Victorian age – the golden era ‐ of Alpine development. Wherry was friendly with Coolidge and Whymper, and also made some of the earliest studies of frostbite and mountain sickness. And the surgeon/mountaineer’s research into the ‘climbing foot’ wasn’t only confined to climbing guides. Through a comprehensive study of the feet of newborn babies and infants fathered by climbing guides, Wherry produced evidence to support Darwin’s still at the time highly controversial “Theory of Evolution”: not only that climbers descended from climbers (the ‘climbing foot’ was passed‐on, generation to generation) but that we, all of us, are descended from apes. John Gill, six‐foot two, a hundred and eighty pounds, and able to do a one‐arm, one‐finger pull‐up, single‐handedly invented what is now known as ‘bouldering’. The publication, in 1977, of Pat Ament’s richly illustrated biography of Gill coincided with my introduction to climbing (on the small rocks around the campsite in Saas Fee), on a family holiday in Switzerland. The image of Gill, a mathematics professor, suspended by only his middle finger, left an indelible fingerprint on my retina. I have gone on to photograph myself doing a one‐arm, one‐finger pull‐up, almost every day since ‐ 33 years worth; the age Jesus was when he first performed the crucifix. 1 “Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot”: G. Wherry, Macmillan & Bowes, Cambridge, 1896, p.121.
Greg Lucas (b.1964) is a photo‐artist and Pataphysician whose speciality is afront room slideshow ‘from the other side’. His frenetic monologues explore and exploit how everyday events (past and present) can be connected by photographic facts (not painstaking fictions). Lucas has presented solo slideperformances, exhibited image/text works and been published widely, since 1987: The Photographers’ Gallery, London, ICA, London, Arts Theatre, Soho, Edinburgh Festival, Gallery Photography Dublin, Site Gallery Sheffield, ZoneGallery, Newcastle, Norwich Arts Centre. Along with Ruth Blue he performed and broadcast a “SlideShow for the Radio” as part of John Peel’s 1998 Meltdown Festival, from London’s South Bank Centre. He’s also a regular performer at several universities throughout the UK. His monograph, Mrs Sharpe’s Cracks, discusses his conception in a canoe, love of lard, and how a love of lard and his 84 year old neighbour’s cracks (she was a widow) led to the discovery that he was almost killed by the largest meteorite to ever land on the British Isles ‐ it landed on Lucas’s roof on Christmas Eve in 1965, when he was 1 ‐ which in turn led to him climbing the aging widow’s house, unbeknown to her, even through she documented it photographically. More recently, a speculative image‐text “The Floating Photographer and the Mermaid’s Oars”, for Glen Jamison’s book “Suspicions Of A Peninsula Town’, YH485 Press, 2009. David Brittain interviews Lucas, for “The Missing Picture” in the latest edition of “Source” (no. 62), summer 2010. Greg Lucas lives and works in London, and teaches on MA Photography at De Montfort University.