Chalk and Harness: A Climbing Session in a Bogota Gym

Seven frames from an indoor climbing wall in Bogota - checking a harness, chalked palms, a rope run through a belay device - built around one warm wardrobe colour against grey concrete.

Climbing gyms are visually generous and quietly difficult. Generous because every wall is already a graphic composition of coloured holds on grey. Difficult because the actual sport takes place fifteen metres above your head.

This session was deliberately shot entirely from the ground.

The sport is mostly preparation

Ask anyone who climbs what the sport consists of and the honest answer involves a great deal of standing at the bottom of a wall looking up at it. Chalking. Checking a buckle for the third time. Feeding rope through a device. Belaying somebody else for twenty minutes with your head tilted back.

So that is the set. There is no hero shot of somebody topping out. There is a harness buckle, a pair of chalked palms, a rope running through a belay plate, and a woman looking up at a route working out how she is going to do it. Half the pictures are details and I think it is a truer document of an afternoon at a wall than an action frame would have been.

One warm colour against all that grey

The wardrobe decision carries the whole set. A concrete wall studded with red, yellow and blue holds is busy, and skin tones get lost against it very quickly.

Putting the subject in a single warm rust-orange does two things: it sits in the same family as the warmest holds so she belongs in the space, and it is saturated enough to separate her from the grey. Shot at wide apertures the holds behind her dissolve into soft coloured discs, which is a background almost anyone would pay to build.

“There is no shot of anyone topping out. The sport is mostly the twenty minutes before that.”

Chalk is a gift

The best frame in the set is two open palms covered in chalk. Backlit slightly, so the loose dust catches and the hands are rimmed in white.

Every sport has one substance that photographs better than the sport itself - track dirt on a jockey's goggles, water coming off a swimmer, chalk on a climber's hands. Finding it is usually the fastest route into a set. It is the same instinct that produced the goggle frame in the Miami jockeys series and the bubble trail in the swimmers and divers project.