THE CRUX of Washburn's photographic anonymity, as I'd come to see it, was that it had been too easy to dismiss his work as scientific documentation—simply the result of a persistent technician banging away at the landscape, with no vision or purpose other than research. All too often his pictures were used as examples of geological force and pattern, as illustrations in textbooks, as images overlaid with dotted lines tracing new climbing routes, such as the one he pioneered on the West Buttress of McKinley in 1951. Many top alpinists set off on expeditions with a Washburn contact print, a hand-drawn map, and a scouting report sent by Washburn himself. Seen this way, his photographs could be described as functional, a word that might apply if they weren't—when properly printed and purely presented—so overpowering.

Likewise, it would be easy to think that Washburn's peaks are so spectacular that any fool with a camera could get lucky now and then. The truth of the matter is that there are plenty of fools with cameras, but no one has yet in the history of photography made such compelling pictures of mountains. The Tairraz family of France spawned four generations of alpine photographers, including Georges, who did notable work in the Alps in the 1930s. Before him, Italian Vittorio Sella carried huge plate cameras in the Alps, Alaska, and the Himalayas in the late 19th century. Washburn knew of these men, and they were influential in his decision to use large-format cameras. Although the late Galen Rowell, who was Washburn's friend for almost 40 years, was himself an accomplished climber and a truly fine photographer of mountains, his most memorable work was made while on the peaks, not in the air around or above.

Only in Washburn's pictures are mountains seen whole, as individuals highlighted in a community of mountains. He has made portraits of mountains, endowing them with singularity and personality. In his preface to Mount McKinley: The Conquest of Denali (1991), Ansel Adams writes of Washburn's work, "The photographs look almost inevitable, perfectly composed." Through a simple purity that arose out of reverence, honesty of intention, technical competence, and passion, Washburn created photographs that reveal not the maker but what legendary photographer Edward Weston described as "the thing itself."

"Washburn is one of the few who has been able to make great science and great art," says Donald Smith, author of the 2002 Washburn biography On High. "His pictures are pure genius, but he doesn't know why. . . . He just has the soul of an artist."