EVEREST
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present EVEREST, a selection of Mount Everest aerial photographs taken in late 1983 by William Thompson on assignment for National Geographic magazine. These photographs represent the first and only complete aerial imagery ever taken of Mount Everest.
The images were made in the cauldron of an ongoing geopolitical intrigue: to overfly Tibet required a delicate navigation of the political, social and religious landscapes of China, India, Tibet and Nepal — accomplished through ten years of partnership-building by the Boston Museum of Science and the National Geographic Society. Their sublime beauty reveals that this most perilous terrain on the planet is also among the most architecturally beautiful: a fresh and rare view of the contested border between emerging superpowers and their often vulnerable smaller neighbors.
Thompson holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oregon and a BA in Cultural Anthropology, with a minor in painting, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked as a photographer with National Geographic for twelve years, covering stories from the world's vanishing elephants to the people and geography of Bhutan, the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, and the wilderness of Alaska.
The photographs were made in late 1983, on assignment for National Geographic — the first and only complete aerial survey of Mount Everest. Overflying the Himalaya meant threading the airspace and politics of China, India, Tibet and Nepal, the product of ten years of partnership-building by the Boston Museum of Science and the National Geographic Society. Thompson shot from a high-altitude Learjet and a Pilatus turboprop, on oxygen in freezing cabins — a process as perilous for the photographer and pilots as the peaks were for any climber.
