Auguste-Rosalie Bisson
Louis-Auguste (1814–1876) and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (1826–1900) established their Paris studio in 1840, becoming official photographers to Napoleon III and producing large-format architectural and documentary work that placed them among the leading French studios of the Second Empire. In June 1861, Auguste-Rosalie attempted the first photographic ascent of Mont Blanc and was turned back by weather. He returned in July with twenty-five porters carrying glass plates, volatile chemicals, and a portable darkroom tent — the wet collodion process required development on site, within minutes of exposure. The resulting prints were the first photographs made at 4,807 metres. The studio was declared bankrupt in 1863; the archive was auctioned on 7 April 1864 and acquired by the civil engineer Émile Placet. The Bisson alpine negatives subsequently passed into the Léon & Lévy catalogue — which had itself acquired the Ferrier & Soulier business that same year — where they were re-indexed and published in stereoscopic format.
The 1868 series
In 1868, Auguste-Rosalie Bisson returned to the Mont Blanc massif, this time to produce a purpose-made series of stereoscopic views for Léon & Lévy — a format and a market that had not existed at the time of the 1861 ascent. The stereoscopic glass slide, held to a viewer, produced an image in apparent three dimensions: the depth of a glacier, the drop of a crevasse, the scale of a snow face were effects the format was uniquely suited to convey. The series was published under the Léon & Lévy 9000 catalogue number sequence. This plate, “9021. Un passage dangereux. Ascension du Mont-Blanc”, belongs to that series.
The composition
Where Nr.018 places the camera close — the figures reduced to silhouettes between rock faces, the passage tight and legible — this plate operates at the opposite scale. The camera is positioned high and distant: the five climbers are small forms in the middle of a vast snow field, dwarfed by the glacier behind them and the summit mass above. The foreground is occupied entirely by the broken lip of a crevasse, its depth unreadable from above. The Grands-Mulets — a rocky spur at approximately 3,050 metres on the Chamonix route — served as the last refuge before the final push toward the summit; the “départ” of the title is the moment of setting out across the upper glacier before dawn, when the snow is still frozen and the crevasse bridges hold. The two plates are numbered consecutively in the Léon & Lévy 9000 series — 9021 and 9028 — and document the same ascent from two irreconcilable distances: one inside the danger, one looking at the mountain from far enough away to see how small the party is within it.
The plate
Stereoscopic glass slide, 8.3 × 17 cm, blackprint collection. Plate title: “9028. Départ des Grands-Mulets. Mont-Blanc.” Photographer: Auguste-Rosalie Bisson. Published by Léon & Lévy, Paris, 1868 (series 9000).
Printed on Awagami Bamboo Washi, 250 g/m², 30 × 30 cm. Edition of 90, Zürich.
