Post - The Project Magazine

This fall saw the publication of Climbing Rock: Vertical Explorations Across North America, a coffee-table book by Jesse Lynch with photography by François Lebeau. François’s images accompany Jesse’s prose as they take the reader on a journey following the diverse range of climbing on offer across the USA, Canada and Mexico, throughout the seasons.

How does project like this come about? Did your start off with this book as a specific goal or did it gather stream slowly over time?

The book came very organically through my work process. I’ve been doing climbing photography for the past 10 years or so just by pure interest and love for the sport. I believe strongly that when you love something very much, you shouldn’t count the time you are putting in; just do it and it will pay off in some way, someday. So shooting it on my own time helped me to build a solid portfolio of the sport and slowly be recognized for what I’ve been doing.

“As long as I was capturing the essence of what climbing is to us, I was achieving my goal.”

Fast forward many years later, one friend of mine (the author of the book, Jesse Lynch) had this project in mind: doing a new photo book of the best places to climb in North America. And luckily, I was top of his list! That’s basically how it all started.

In the process of creation to compile the image collection, we went through ALL my archive of climbing images, reshot many of them due to the standard of quality I impose myself and planned many trips to cover places I had never been before. At the beginning, I thought we would use mainly images I’d shot already, but as it turned out, about 70% of the book is brand new images, which in the end is great ‘cause the images were almost exclusively for the book.

Climbing photography is now a relatively nature medium, and we're surrounded by it at every turn. What were your influences as this project built momentum?

To be honest, during the creation of this book, I was pretty much in my bubble. I can say that my style around the subject as been on the work for many years and now I needed to get it done. I just treated myself with how I really wanted to picture those areas that I needed to shoot. When the project was offered to me, I was so excited to pull out images I really liked for a long time but never had the platform to publish to the grand public. So for the images that needed to be shot, I just did it. It was lots of fun creating it.

The book covers a lot of ground geographically—which must bring opportunities as well as challenges. How do you approach shooting at a location that is totally new to you? How does the contrast in those experiences, compared to your regular stomping grounds, influence your output?

When it was time to shoot at a new location, I was very excited. I would let myself soak in my very first impression of the place and create along with it. Knowing a place definitely helps knowing what you want to shoot and whatnot—but when you just don’t know, everything is new which is awesome. I was following my instinct and just using that time as a blank canvas to pull as much as I could out of it. Local climbers were a big help in guiding me through the new maze, to the good areas and to the climbs worth seeing, but sometimes I preferred to just shoot a line that looked pretty to my eyes, not really knowing what it was, or if it was a classic 5 stars ‘must do over' shot climb. As long as I was capturing the essence of what climbing is to us, I was achieving my goal.

It can be difficult to be objective about your own images, especially ones you have lived with for a long time. When it came to making the image selection for the book, how did you approach it? How are your views balanced with the writer's and/or publisher's decisions on the final cut?

It was actually very interesting. Everybody knew I had quite a library of images to choose from. We printed ALL the potential images that might make it to the book, which was about maybe 600-700 images. It was very humbling to see that pile of photos in front of me, symbolizing basically all I’ve done over the past 10 years. And my now friend Martynka, who’s the project manager of the book, warned me. She would go through the pile very quick and take away all the images that she wasn’t ‘feeling’. I was fine with it cause I was happy with pretty much most of the stuff in the pile already. And the best best would be obvious to pin and kept for the final selects.

The whole choice of images was made in a very collaborative manner in between the whole team. The process of the book went very smooth and not many decisions were made by one person. We couldn’t have asked for a better chemistry.

As a learning experience, what is your biggest takeaway from the whole process? What would you do differently if you had the chance?

To be honest, not much. The book’s turnaround was pretty quick which was very challenging, to gather and produce all the necessary content for it, but the stars were aligned and we were able to do it. I always want more images at the end, but this is pretty much my daily problem. I think we had such a good team and content that I was very happy with, hard to see this situation be better.

Climbing Rock is available from Rizzoli here.

Read our Exposure interview with François here.