SOCIETY

Georgia Welcomed as New Member of Int’l Federation of Mountain Guides Associations

BY KATIE RUTH DAVIES

The IFMGA integrates almost 6,000 mountain guides in more than 20 countries worldwide. Photo: Mountain Resorts of Georgia.

At the end of November, the Georgian Mountain Guide Association (GMGA) was named an offi cial member of the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations (IFMGA), having been a candidate since 2018.

A national association of trained and certifi ed trekking, rock, alpine, ski and mountain guides of Georgia, the GMGA has been developing adventure guiding institutions and training programs in the country since 1998.

The association works to ‘strengthen institutional and educational platforms of adventure tourism professions in Georgia for the safety of tourists and their guides,’ and, as of November 24, all those trained by the Adventure Tourism School (ATS) in Georgia will now automatically become international IFMGA-certifi ed mountain guides.

GEORGIA TODAY contacted Ilia Berulava, the GMGA Secretary, to fi nd out what this means for Georgia.

“Simply put, it’s a quality mark for the Georgian adventure tourism industry. It means our professional and educational standards of institutional development and organizational capacity meet international criteria, with the Adventure Tourism School’s Mountain Diploma Program now having international recognition,” he tells us. “30 mountain guides who graduated from the School now have the status of international mountain guides.

“With its membership, Georgia gained the right to vote in the process of formulating a mountain guide policy worldwide, referring to professional activity and safety standards, education, and mobility between countries, etc.,” he adds.

Berulava notes that with IFMGA membership, Georgia’s Adventure Tourism School, which was established in 2016, will now be able to accept students from any country in the world for the international diploma program ‘Mountain Guide.’

“Mountain guides graduating in Georgia will be able to carry out activities in 25 IFMGA member countries,” he tells us.

Looking ahead, he notes that in 2024, according to a preliminary application, the IFMGA General Assembly will be held in Georgia. Further, the International Federation of Mining Associations and the Mining Association of Georgia have signed a memorandum on economic and educational cooperation, which includes assistance to the ATS with international expertise, the involvement of international experts in new programs, and the opening of job-based learning opportunities for Georgian students.

“Additionally, the ATS, in collaboration with the French National School of Mountaineering and Skiing (ENSA), will start developing new adventure professions, including paragliding,” Berulava says.

And there’s more to come, he tells us, as the Association of Mountain Guides has started the process of joining a second international organization: The International Union of Mountain Leaders (UIMLA), within which the Adventure Tourism School will introduce international standards to hiking in Georgia. The partners and supporters of this process are many, among them the Ministry of Education and Science and the Mountain Resorts Development Company, as co-founders of the ATS; the Vocational Education Direction Team and Skills Agency of the Ministry of Education; the Technical University of Munich; the Swiss and German Mountain Guide Associations and their experts involved in the educational and examination process of the ATS; the Millennium Corporation, US Embassy, Embassy of Switzerland, International Organization for Migration, USAID, GIZ, ADA / GRETA, and UNDP.

“Post Covid-19, tourism is focusing more and more on nature-based and adventure tourism, Berulava says. “These trends can be seen both in domestic travel and international visitor numbers. In a sense, this is a unique opportunity for Georgia to re-emerge and reposition itself on international markets, since adventure and experience tourism are areas where Georgia certainly has a competitive advantage, as opposed to mass tourism, which dominated in the recent pre-Covid years.

“From the GMGA and ATS side, our strategy will be to invest resources in training more mountain guides, trying to bridge the supply-demand gap, and to diversify our programs towards other adventure fi elds: equestrian, rafting, paragliding, canyoning, etc, so that Georgia has a suffi cient cadre to respond to post-Covid 19 demand on outdoor activities.”

The IFMGA, founded in 1965 by guides from Austria, France, Switzerland and Italy, is the international umbrella for mountain guide associations from more than 20 countries in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania, representing a total of almost 6000 guides. Each national association represents all of that country’s mountain guides who are qualifi ed according to IFMGA guidelines.

Aims of the IFMGA: • Regulate the mountain guide profession at a global scale; • Represent the interests of the mountain guiding profession to governments; • Support standardized laws and regulations for the mountain guide profession; • Determine mandatory international training standards; • Implement reciprocal acceptance of IFMGA qualifi cation; • Support free professional activity for mountain guides; • Support existing national mountain guides associations and develop new ones; • Provide services and assistance for mountain guides.

The Rest is Up to You

BLOG BY TONY HANMER

Ihave been contemplating what form my photos would best take when offered to anyone to buy, and looking at various online shop options as well. One of my conclusions is that I might offer only black and white images, none in color.

WHY?

Although my earliest photos, which I began taking with the family’s Kodak Instamatic 126 camera when I was 11 in 1978, were all in color, a few years after that my fi rst darkroom work (at school) was all black and white. This process allows one to use a red safe light in the darkroom, as the fi lm and paper are not sensitive to it. Color fi lm and paper are sensitive to all human-visible light, which means you have to work in total darkness when developing or printing: much harder. So a lot of my early work was in black and white, negatives and prints both.

I did then branch out into color, either slides or negatives, and almost all of my total body of 35mm fi lm frames, about 11000 of them, are color. This does allow one the luxury of choice: it’s much easier to get a black and white version of a color original than the other way around, even given the proliferation of AI-powered colorizers, which take a mono original and add increasingly more faithful color to it. (The quality overall is improving rapidly).

Still, why offer only mono, with so much color work available to me, including ALL my tens of thousands of digital frames made since 2008?

It’s more an esthetic choice, governed by my preferences in the work of others, the giants who have come before me. The earliest of these had only black and white to work with, in the 19th century, including my great-great-great-great grandmother, Julia Margaret Cameron, Britain’s most famous woman photographer of that century. Her portraits of quite a few famous people of her society, using mostly window light and handcoated glass negatives, took several MINUTES of the subject sitting stockstill. Don’t move even your eyes for three minutes, Darwin!

Ansel Adams, perhaps the world’s most famous landscape photographer ever and of course a favorite of mine, worked mostly, though not exclusively, in mono, in the middle of the 20th century. His main subject was the landscapes and still life details of America. He used large format fi lm, up to 8 x 10 inches mostly, and developed this and printed it himself until he got too famous and busy to do so. His originals bring in huge sums today. The same, more Caucasus-locally, and earlier, with Vittorio Sella and Dmitri Ermakov.

Arguably the most famous portrait of the 20th century, and the most infl uential, is also in mono. Armenian-Canadian photographer Karsh was still up-andcoming when Churchill spoke at the Canadian Parliament during World War II and had his portrait taken by him. Faced with the great man’s refusal to stop smoking his cigar on request, Karsh removed it himself, then took the shot, of a rather belligerent subject (who smiled for a second frame). The glare galvanized Britain into full fi ghting force against the Nazis. Karsh went on to worldwide success and demand for his portraits, in both mono and color.

The thing with the world is… it’s in color, subtle or saturated, with very rare exceptions like the starkest winter scenes. Rendering it in black and white means that you are taking something away which the viewer’s eye must, or may, add back if desired. The imagination may fi ll in the missing hues. But it need not if it doesn’t want to. With monochrome, you are allowing composition and tone (the only remaining elements of the photo) to dominate, without the distraction from them which color can bring, drawing sometimes too much attention to itself. Try to imagine the most color-dependent images in black and white, though: a sunset. Autumn foliage. A peacock. Fruit. These and more have also most dramatically and successfully been captured as photos in only shades from black through all the grays to white; Google them if you want to. And we still gasp.

This is what I’m after in my own work.

And…as always at the moment, in Georgia’s current political season, #mishavs means: “It matters to me”!

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/ groups/SvanetiRenaissance/ He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti