Galen Rowell
August 23, 1940 - August 11, 2002
Born in 1940 in Oakland and raised in Berkeley, California, Galen was introduced to wilderness before he could walk. He began climbing mountains at the age of ten on Sierra Club outings, and at sixteen made his first roped climbs in Yosemite Valley. Over the next fifteen years he logged more than a hundred first ascents of new routes there and in the High Sierra backcountry.
Taking photographs began as a way to share his high and wild world with friends and family. In 1972 he became a full-time photographer after selling his small automotive business. Less than a year later he did his first major magazine assignment - a cover story for National Geographic.
Galen pioneered a special brand of participatory wilderness photography in which the photographer transcends being an observer with a camera to become an active participant in the image being photographed. His emotional connection to his subject matter came across clearly in his early mountain climbing photographs that first drew public recognition, but his landscape imagery, often made on the same adventures, has proven even more evocative because of the visual power he created from what he described as "a continuing pursuit in which the art becomes the adventure, and vice-versa." In 1984 he received the Ansel Adams Award for his contributions to the art of wilderness photography. In 1992 Galen received a National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Grant to photograph Antarctica.
Note: Galen Rowell and his wife, Barbara, were killed in a plane crash near the Bishop airport on August 11, 2002, on their way home from a photo workshop class in Alaska.