Fidelman: A Body of Work - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dean Fidelman has been climbing and photographing climbers for more than forty years. When he was sixteen years old, he befriended legendary Yosemite climbers John Bachar and John Long, and his photographic documentation of Yosemite's legendary "Stone Masters" began. In 2009 Fidelman teamed up with John Long and coauthored The Stone Masters about Yosemite in the 1950s, and The Valley Climbers. His project Stone Nudes began in 1999, with twenty calendars and a self-published book released in 2010. 

John Long is an American rock climber and author of over forty book titles. His how-to books on adventure sports have been industry leaders for twenty years. His books Advanced Rock Climbing and The Stonemasters: California Rock Climbers in the Seventies both won the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival for Mountain Exposition, and he is the 2006 recipient of the Literary Award from the American Alpine Club, their highest honor.

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Say What?

That’s what we said back in 1999, when Dean Fidelman broke out his first Stone Nude calendar. Mostly we stared at the black and white portraits of nude rock climbers, lean torsos stretching, bare feet gripping the rock, often positioned in almighty venues like Yosemite, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon.

“Stripped down of everything except, in some cases, a pair of rock shoes,” wrote Outside editor Matt Samet, “the climbers are distilled to their proper place, merely one note in the natural symphony — and rarely the dominant one.”  

The images dazzled, but also confused. If Stone Nudes belonged to a genre, no one knew which one. Docu-art? Boudoir al fresco?  

"Back then, climbing culture hadn't developed a visual art like surfing had," said Fidelman, citing the work of LeRoy Grannis, the godfather of surf photography, renowned for documenting 1960’s surf culture. Adventure sports had loads of stuff posing as visual art. All those self-absorbed, in-the-field images peppered throughout apparel catalogues. Stone Nudes, however, was not made to hawk parkas or day packs. Stone Nudes were the product, visual sculpture built, as Fidelman tells it, on styles first explored by a quartet of early twentieth century artists. 

- Introduction by John Long