Jim Herrington is a photographer whose portraits of musicians and celebrities have appeared on the pages of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Outside and The New York Times as well as on scores of album covers for more than three decades.
For nearly twenty years, and while traveling to ten countries, Herrington created a portrait series of early-to-mid 20th Century mountain climbing legends. The result is The Climbers, a collection of sixty black-and-white photographs that document these rugged individualists, including the likes of Royal Robbins, Reinhold Messner, Yvon Chouinard and Riccardo Cassin. Between the 1920s and 1970s these determined men and women used primitive gear along with their considerable wits, talent, and fortitude to tackle unscaled peaks around the world. In these images, Herrington has captured their humanity, obsession, intellect, and frailty.
The Climbers received both the Grand Prize and the Mountaineering History awards at the 2017 Banff Film & Book Festival, with a subsequent years-long book tour and exhibitions across Europe, North America and Asia.
An Italian translation of The Climbers was published in Italy in 2023 and the Korean edition in 2026.
His photography has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous private collections.