Ask enough rock climbers how they ended up in Gardiner and you’ll start to hear a similar origin story: the weekend commute from the city, the slow conversion of the hatchback into a second home, the irreversible moment when a hand meets that white-gray stone and something ancient fires in the synapses. Photographer and climber Chris Vultaggio has his own version—gym kid from Long Island meets a cadre of old-school mentors, discovers the Gunks, falls hard—but the coda is what separates him those who merely daydreamed about chucking it all away for the cliff. He actually did it.
“I’ve been here almost 10 years now,” he tells me. “I interviewed [for jobs] in Boulder and Salt Lake, but there’s something about the Hudson Valley. Incredible community. And it’s mellow. Nobody’s asking you how many vertical feet you did today.” For a sport prone to chest-thumping, the Shawangunks remain a study in restraint: world-class climbing, a culture of mentorship, and none of the altitude-culture machismo that hangs in the air out West like wildfire smoke.
That sensibility—quiet, technical, attentive—runs straight through “High Exposure: Climbing in the Shawangunks,” Vultaggio’s exhibition at the Mohonk Preserve Visitor Center. The show, on view December 4–31, is exactly what the title promises: Climbers surrounded by vastness, people etched against stone. But the “exposure” is less about risk than revelation. His images open a window not just onto climbing, but onto what climbing does to a person: the fear, the elation, the small private moments that never make the catalogs.
Vultaggio arrived at climbing photography in a backwards way. Unlike the usual trajectory—climber first, photographer second—he was a working shooter long before he touched quartz conglomerate. His undergraduate degree is in print journalism, and an editor at his first gig as a newspaper taught him the trinity of images: the wide establishing shot, the hero moment, and the emotional close-up. The last one stuck. It still governs how he works today.
In the Gunks, that emotional register is often embedded in the light—and the lack of it. “Beginners worry about equipment. Intermediates worry about money. Masters worry about light,” he says, citing a maxim attributed to photographer Vernon Trent. In climbing photography, light becomes a second cliff: fickle, sideways, often unusable. Most of the Gunks faces south, meaning sunrise and sunset—the hallowed hours—are notoriously tricky. And when you’re dangling by a rope, you can’t just “take three steps left,” Vultaggio says. Getting in position might mean jugging a rope in the dark, or rigging for hours only to discover the ambient conditions are garbage. “You have to be a student of your terrain before you even take the camera out of the bag,” he says.
It’s a line that could serve as his artistic manifesto. While plenty of climbing photographers chase the aerial hero shot—the airborne dyno, the tiny speck on a massive wall—Vultaggio is drawn to something smaller and more human. “Climbing has that slam-dunk moment,” he says, “but the real image is the emotion around it: fear, focus, joy, the gritting of teeth.” His favorite pictures aren’t the ones that scream danger; they’re the moments where non-climbers can feel themselves in the frame.
Not that Vultaggio hasn’t lived the higher-risk version. In 2012, he joined an American expedition in the Himalayas—five weeks on big mountains without Sherpas, carrying his own camera equipment at 20,000 feet. “Highest highs, lowest lows,” he recalls. “It destroyed me. Physically, physiologically. It took months just to get back to baseline.” When I ask whether he’d do it again, he doesn’t hesitate: no. He’s not built for altitude, and the ego cost of admitting that wasn’t small. But you don’t survive five weeks at altitude without developing the rarest of creative muscles: the ability to produce—intentionally, creatively—when everything hurts, and the mountain doesn’t care whether you get the shot.
Back in the Hudson Valley, the risks are different. Sometimes it’s the nature of the climb itself. Climbers in the Gunks have long defended their traditional climbing ethic—no bolting, no convenience hardware, no shortcuts. It’s a literal and philosophical throughline that fascinates Vultaggio. His newest documentary project, Traditions, explores that history, weaving interviews with local climbers and legends like Henry Barber and Lynn Hill into a narrative about commitment, conservation, and what happens when the only protection you get is what you place.
Gravity, as he likes to say, doesn’t discriminate.
Which is maybe why he’s as animated talking about photographing an outrageously difficult climb—a true no-fall zone—as he is about photographing kids from the Bronx who have never been out of the city. He and his wife work with nonprofits that introduce those kids to climbing, and he speaks about those days with the quiet reverence usually reserved for first ascents. “It cracks their world open,” he says. “That’s more meaningful to me than shooting the strongest climbers in the world.”
For all the technical expertise behind his work—the rigging, the rope management, the choreography of light and stone—what you notice in a Vultaggio photograph is the person. The climber is rarely swallowed by the landscape; instead, the landscape reveals who they are. Not the superhuman athlete, not the catalog model dangling over a void, but the interior climber: the one negotiating fear, or trusting a piece of gear, or discovering that the rock has something to teach.
“Combining climbing and photography is a beautiful challenge,” he says. “Eventually one of them has to bend. But when they don’t—when both things work—it’s magic.”
“High Exposure: Climbing in the Shawangunks” opens December 4 at the Mohonk Preserve Visitor Center, 3197 Route 55, in Gardiner, with a reception on December 6 from 3–5pm.
