A majority of the prints were produced from the original negatives of George Mallory, who was to die high on Everest in 1924, and Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the 1921 expedition. The remainder were made from the negatives of Edward Wheeler, Alexander Wollaston and Guy Henry Bullock.

This project is the fruit of a partnership between the Royal Geographical Society and Salto Ulbeek. It began with a detailed historical overview of the nearly ten thousand negatives brought back from the 1921, 1922, 1924, 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938 and 1953 Mount Everest expeditions, and which are now kept in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society. A selection of the most historically and aesthetically significant negatives where then scanned at an extremely high resolution, allowing for a better analysis of their material quality and state of preservation. Where they could be exploited, the high resolution scans where then digitally cleaned and restored. This painstaking process requires up to a day of work per photograph and which has thus far only been carried out on the negatives brought back from the initial 1921 expedition.

Once restored to the original condition, some of George Mallory’s negatives were combined into panoramas as he had originally intended, and all of the photographs were printed through the platinum-palladium printing process, employing special techniques developed by Salto Ulbeek. The coming years will see the extension of this work and project to the expeditions that followed on from 1921.