THE RESEARCH I did prior to our meeting revealed that I was in for a fight. One interviewer described Washburn as "tough, gruff, and feisty." "He is very purposeful," said Tony Decanaes, 59, who wrote the text for the 1999 book Bradford Washburn: Mountain Photography and who shows Washburn's work at his Panopticon Gallery, in Waltham, Massachusetts. "It's instructive that he never went on an expedition led by anyone else," offered David Roberts, a veteran climber, writer, and longtime friend of Washburn. Whatever the task, Washburn has been in control, the man in charge, and nothing about him or the way his life has unfolded seems accidental. Call it certitude. Call it fate. Call it a life of constantly pushing forward with a rare glance over the shoulder and few missteps.

Born in Boston in 1910, Washburn climbed his first peak—New Hampshire's Mount Washington—at age 11. Two years later, his mother, an amateur photographer, gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, the point-and-shoot of its day. When Washburn was 16, his father, an Episcopal minister, took the family on a six-month sabbatical to Europe, where the fledgling alpinist summited Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. Not long after enrolling at Harvard in 1929, Washburn began lecturing at Carnegie Hall and the National Geographic Society about his climbs. He was just 21 when inducted into the Explorers Club. Seven years later, he began his museum career, not as an assistant but as director of Boston's natural history museum, a post he would hold for the next 40 years.

Washburn evolved into a remarkably well-rounded explorer—a pioneer of geography, mountains, and aerial photography. Following his museum appointment, he led 16 research trips

A compulsive problem solver, Washburn would remove the door of an airplane and muscle his 50-pound camera into position using a spiderweb of ropes, lashing himself in to keep from being sucked into the void.

in the 1940s and '50s, producing the first aerial images of Alaska's great uncharted ranges, as well as Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn—all while notching first ascents and holding down his day job at the museum. He completed the first map of Mount McKinley in 1960, and spent the next 20 years producing aerial surveys of peaks in the Yukon, glaciers in Alaska, and vast tracts of the Grand Canyon. In 1984, he led the first photographic flights over Mount Everest, research that culminated in the first accurate map of the Nepal Himalayas. From these expeditions sprang a spectacular body of photographic work.

I had the chance to see it for myself on a brisk Sunday afternoon last fall. I'd traveled to Boston to view Colossal, an exhibition of 20 of Washburn's supersize digital prints (approximately 40 by 60 inches) at the Panopticon Gallery, 15 minutes by car from the apartment he shares with his wife of 65 years, Barbara, in a retirement community on the outskirts of Lexington. A crowd of about 150 had gathered for this rare solo show by one of America's finest living photographers.

A brief introduction was given by Tony Decanaes. Although Washburn spent nearly 80 years in the field, his images would still be virtually unknown to collectors if it weren't for Decanaes's inspired vision. The two met through a mutual friend in 1990, and Decanaes immediately sensed what they could do together. "Mountaineers knew about Brad," he explains, "but outside of that sphere he was almost unknown. I saw those photographs and I knew this was an opportunity for Brad—and for me. I saw them big, and I saw them beautiful."

When Washburn took the floor, wearing a suit and tie and armed with a laser pointer, my first impression was that he was shorter than I expected—somewhere around five foot seven—for someone who'd lugged 90-plus-pound packs across rivers and through countless miles of untracked wilderness as a young man. He has silvery hair, quick, hawk eyes, and a lean, slightly bent frame. Washburn directed the laser's red dot to After the Storm: Climbers on the Doldenhorn, taken in Switzerland in 1960, and began tracing the footsteps of the six miniature climbers silhouetted on a snowy, cloud-shrouded ridge.

"I was in Switzerland working on a map," Washburn said, projecting his voice past the front row to the back of the room, "and I asked them if there was anyone around here who had a small airplane. I'd never been up to take a look at the big Swiss peaks, particularly the Jungfrau. Someone answered that, yes, they do know a butcher who has such a plane. ‘He's an honest-to-God butcher,' they told me, ‘but he has an airplane just like the one you've been using in Alaska.' "

Washburn was having his way with this bunch, serving up the kind of humor and understated derring-do that are implicit in trusting a butcher to escort you around the Alps' highest peaks. "As we were approaching the Jungfrau, we had to make a sharp turn," he continued, "and all of a sudden this picture was straight in front of my eyes!" Which is exactly how it felt to see it there—looming large in sharp, stark detail.

Describing an aerial he made of the Matterhorn in 1958, Washburn drew laughs when he recounted how you could stand on the summit and face a particular direction and pee one mile. This sort of dogged quantification is trademark Washburn. "Whenever I'd visit him," David Roberts recalls, "he'd pull out something that he'd just written up, such as how many footsteps it would take to climb a certain route. He's endlessly enthusiastic—it's kept him alive for all these years—but he's also one of the most obsessive people I know."

Big mountains demanded big cameras, so Washburn—a compulsive problem solver—would remove the side door from the single-engine airplane and muscle his 50-pound Fairchild K-6 into position using a spiderweb of ropes, lashing himself to the bulkhead to keep from being sucked into the void. And in order to view his negatives in the field, he'd build his own backcountry developing tanks from three-gallon steel drums. In this way, he has spent his life straddling science and art, art and science—never fully realized in either. The moment he seemed comfortable in one role, he tackled another. And another.