Marvin Heiferman
Text for the book A Portrait of Ice, 2012
Glaciers—massive and frozen reservoirs of freshwater—range in size from the length of a football field to the breadth of a continent. Photographs, on a much smaller scale, are reservoirs too. They store up a good deal of the data we rely upon to engage with, function in, and document the world. They blanket culture, media and everyday life, just as glacial ice covers vast portions of the globe. Bore down below the surface of glaciers—or photographs—and layers of stratified evidence and meaning re-emerge. Scientists drill, sometimes more than a mile deep into the earth, to extract core samples from ice fields, flecked with dust, ash, traces of atmospheric gas or radioactive substances, even fragments of meteorites. Upon examination they reveal the details of hundreds of thousands of years of climatic history and change. Look deeply and critically enough at the information and narratives embedded in any single photograph and something similar happens as evidence of flash-frozen moments and their motivation resurfaces and falls into place.
In his first book, The Silent Aftermath of Space (2010), a series of evocative black-and-white images of New York City, Caleb Cain Marcus explored the paradoxical atmosphere of solitude and calm that busy urban centers take on late at night. And while it was his intention to continue to explore comparable American cityscapes and themes, a trip to the tip of South America triggered a shift in Cain Marcus’s subject matter and imaging strategies, if not his underlying interests. For two years, he dedicated himself to photographing glaciers in the northern and southern hemispheres, joining the list of photographers who have, over time, been drawn to icy terrain. In 1915 and three years after the Titanic sank, British photographer Frank Hurley’s now-iconic images of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to the Arctic Circle showed his ship, the Endurance, trapped in and crushed by ice. In more recent decades, photographers such as Lynn Davis and James Balog have produced impressive bodies of work about, respectively, icebergs and glacial melt. With the rise of ecotourism, spectacular ice-covered sites have become popular destination spots for less adventurous and more pampered travelers, the amateur photographers who shoot souvenir snapshots of towers of ice from the safety of balconies attached to their cruise ship staterooms.
It was in the region of Patagonia in January of 2010—in the course of a trek atop the ninety-seven-square-mile Perito Moreno glacier—that Cain Marcus would experience a deep sense of solitude and calm similar to what he felt in New York, but this time in a stunning and startlingly different environment. The photographs Cain Marcus made in Argentina—as well as others he would subsequently make on trips to Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and Alaska—are eerily gorgeous and unusual, particularly when compared to the stereotypic images we encounter in environmental reportage and on labels that wrap around plastic bottles of “natural” water. In the images in this project, however, glaciers seen from above, instead of from the side, cause our sense of their bulk and scale to get thrown off. With horizon lines obscured by mists, clouds, and topographic ruptures, the shelves of ice Cain Marcus accessed on foot, by kayak or from a helicopter take on a table-top quality, which adds an odd and engrossing sense of indeterminacy to them.
Rather than grand panoramic sweeps of geography, the majority of these images are, surprisingly, vertical. And in them, softly focused expanses of sky appear to be strangely heavy, to compress the landforms into the lower portions of the frame. Instead of picturing monumental walls of ice that advance over and disrupt what lies beneath, or icebergs that break away from glaciers to float majestically, if threateningly, at sea, these photographs suggest that glaciers cover the earth’s surface lightly, like a sheet, rather than bearing down upon it. The jagged rocks, ridges and pinnacles that poke through the frigid surfaces don’t register as being particularly dangerous, but more like the eccentrically rendered landforms you might soar over in a dream or in the elegant flight-simulation of a video game.
It is the painterly quality of these stark images, as much as photographic ones, that makesthe work seductive. The woozy atmospheric conditions that prevail look as if they are air-brushed or stippled in. Images of crenellated landscapes that evoke the surfaces of the brain or the moon, give the impression of being dusted with pigment, like pastels. Although glacial ice does, in fact, have a characteristic blue tint to it—due to the way light bounces off water molecules that have expanded under pressure—the delicate color in these photographs feels as interpretative as it is documentary. The ice-covered ground looks soft rather than hard and so, strangely, the images lull even as they communicate a piercing chilliness. Even the title of this project, A Portrait of Ice, underscores its subtle, yet persistent exploration of opposites. The art historian Richard Brilliant has noted that what portraits ask of us is to both acknowledge and disregard change. And so does photography, in general, which explains the sense of disorientation we feel when, paging through the sequence of images in this book, we encounter some that seem to stutter and repeat, as if we have seen them before. Closer inspection reveals, though, that we have not and that Cain Marcus chose to slide his camera just enough to capture a view from a slightly different perspective or vantage point. This work, like ice itself, is slippery.
As landscapes—extreme, scary and beautiful—these photographs flirt with the sublime. True to their complex and contradictory nature, they hint at how exhilarating a walk atop a glacier might be. They trigger thoughts of what would happen if you wound up stranded upon or buried in one, like the frozen body of Ötsi, the 5,000-year-old “ice man,” discovered half-in and half-out of a receding glacier, by a pair of unsuspecting tourists who were hiking in the Alps in 1991. Scientists estimate that at the end of the last Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago, glacial ice shrouded more than 30 percent of the earth’s landforms and oceans. Today, as that coverage has decreased by two thirds, concern over global warming’s impact mounts as glaciers deflate and retreat, some at a rate that approaches a hundred feet a day. Cain Marcus’s photographs may imply that the settings they depict are frozen in time, but based upon present-day knowledge, they also remind us that nothing—neither glaciers, nor photography itself, for that matter—stays in place or remains the same forever. How curious that as glaciers around the world recede, so, too, does the materiality of the photographic medium in our increasingly digital age. As a result, it’s difficult to look at photographs from this project, even as we respect and marvel at all that seems to be so solid, and not feel a simultaneous sense of awe and nervous anticipation about a future we can barely imagine.