The Biography

Between 1857 and 2000, four photographers will, from father to son, invent and pass on the art of mountain photography. They are called Tairraz. Joseph Tairraz, Georges Tairraz I, Georges Tairraz II, and Pierre Tairraz. The story begins in Chamonix in 1857. Joseph Tairraz, son of the syndic (mayor), buys a daguerreotype device in Geneva. Four years later, before Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, the Emperor's official photographer, he took the first photograph at the top of Mont-Blanc. Very quickly, the young man opened a studio in the center of Chamonix. He will pass the baton to his son Georges. The dynasty is spawned. Georges Tairraz (1900-1975), who will be called Georges Tairraz II, will in turn follow the double career of guide and photographer, extended from 1920 to the practice of cinema. He made his first documentary in 1934, L'Ascension des Aiguilles Ravanel et Mummery, before starting a long collaboration with Roger Frison-Roche. Technical adviser on the shooting of the film Premier De Cordée directed in 1943 by Louis Daquin, Georges Tairraz II accompanied Frison-Roche on his expeditions to Hoggar and Antarctica. With the guide and writer Gaston Rébuffat, he made two films on the north face of the Alps. Georges Tairraz II is the father of Pierre Tairraz who also happened to retrace the history and transformations of Chamonix and mountaineering. For a century and a half, the Tairraz will be the incomparable photographers of Mont-Blanc and, over the generations, will taste the cinema and will befriend other great smugglers of the Alps, such as Roger Frison-Roche and Gaston Rébuffat. The dynasty went dormant on the death of Pierre Tairraz in 2000. It leaves us with a certain way of looking at the mountain, of magnifying its forms to express the emotions of those who think about it.