Beautifully Bleak Photos of Antarctica’s Enormous Icebergs
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Sans Nom is photographer and science journalist Jean de Pomereu's meditation on the monumental — but temporary — icebergs of Antarctica. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
With his photographic work, De Pomereu is interested in the changing public consciousness about Antarctica, from an imagined land in previous centuries to the very real place where important science is done today, albeit still far removed from most people's day-to-day attention. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
The iceberg portraits in Sans Nom are abstract, almost impressionistic, as reminiscent of broad brush strokes as they are hardened mountains of ice. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
"Antarctica is uninhabited," says de Pomereu, "It doesn’t belong to anyone. It doesn’t have an indigenous population, and really the majority of what goes on down there is science, so whether you’re talking about artistic images or scientific images, it all sort of knots together in the scientific realm." Photos by Jean de Pomereu
The diffuse light in Sans Nom was captured in the early morning hours of a single day in the Antarctic summer, when the sun is always above the horizon. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
The photographer traveled to Antarctica on a Chinese ice breaker to visit and report on the work of researchers. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
De Pomereu traveled from berg to berg on a ski-doo piloted by a Russian researcher. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
Despite the temptation to draw in the issue of climate change, de Pomereu says the epic ice crack that punctuates the series was more a sign of the coming of summer, and a reminder of the impermanence of the vast ice scape as it prepares to dissolve back into the sea. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
In Antarctica, objects tend to lose their sense of scale, an effect the photographer hoped to convey with his abstracted impressions of the icebergs. Photos by Jean de Pomereu
SIMILAR GALLERIES
It’s hard to name a place on Earth more remote than Antarctica. Most images of the ice-encrusted continent show a landscape so alien they might as well be on another planet, even though it’s intimately tied to life on ours.
Jean de Pomereu has been fascinated by the icy wilds there for years, both as a science journalist and a photographer. Sans Nom is his beautifully bleak series of abstracted portraits of the mountainous, unnamed glaciers that dominate its landscape. Shot during a surreal early-morning excursion across the Antarctic sea ice, the photos represent a powerful, personal impression of an environment few will ever experience.
“It’s a place where you can really step away from the civilized world and really see the forces of nature at their most fundamental,” de Pomereu says. “It’s like stepping into the inner temple, like going into the crypt of the church.”
While recognizable as icebergs, the images in Sans Nom (which translates to “unnamed”) are much more impressionistic than representational. They could just as easily be the broad brush strokes of a latter day Rothko as rushes of ice migrating seaward. Unlike the stunning photographic work of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, which adhered closer to classical visual sensibilities, the images in de Pomereu’s series are deliberately absent of anything that could give scale to the objects they portray.
“We’ve all been exposed to graphic work and abstraction in art,” he says. “So we’ve grown accustomed to the fact that it doesn’t have to be a pictorial–there doesn’t have to be a subject, there doesn’t have to be a sense of scale. You can actually look at an image in its abstraction.”
Some 250 years after Western explorers first set foot on the continent, the human population of Antarctica is pretty much all scientists. It may not offer much in the way of natural resources–at least not until water becomes as valuable as oil–but the icy desert (considered so because of the lack of precipitation) is fertile ground for experiments looking at climate change, cosmology, marine biology, geology, and other areas of research. Visits are limited to between November and March, during the Antarctic summer season when daylight is continuous.
In November of 2008, De Pomereu traveled there for the fourth International Polar Year aboard the Chinese ice breaker Xue Long to report on the work of the Zhongshan research base in Prydz Bay. Out of curiosity, he visited a nearby Russian encampment and befriended the scientists there. When one of them offered to take him on a ski-doo tour of the sea ice, he immediately grabbed his camera and hopped on.
“I’d been on this expedition for a month and not much has happened and then suddenly this opportunity just pops up and off we go, and it was just absolutely astounding. There was this incredible silence, when the ski-doo was off obviously. There was this sort of thin mist, you had these towering structures, and none of them have names. Unlike mountains or geological features which are perm … well, nothing’s ever permanent. Which are there for a long time and are given names, these things are just there for one season and then they get released–they disappear and that’s that.”
He and the ski-doo-having scientist set out late at night, spending a good eight hours on the sea ice crisscrossing between the bergs that punctuated the waters as they waited for the summer thaw to release them into their northward drift. Diffuse sunlight cast a consistent otherworldly glow throughout the series–none of the pictures in Sans Nom have been altered or color corrected. Shooting on film, he tried to capture the ambiguous sense of scale, and convey some part of the reverie he felt.
“It was like entering Atlantis, like entering this lost city with these architectural runes, and no one had ever been there before in the sense that this landscape changes every year,” he says. “I knew that I was experiencing something really, really extraordinary. It was the quintessence of what I was looking for in Antarctica, and this was probably the most powerful moment I’ve experienced [there]. It was extremely silent and calm, and yet my heart was beating very hard.”
For de Pomereu, Antarctica represents a pure distillation of wild nature. After a series of white and gray washes of ice and sky, the series ends with a broad crack that divides the ice plains. It’s tempting to import a commentary on climate change, but the photographer says this couldn’t have been further from his mind at the time the photos were shot.
“This crack represents really the beginning of the breakup process, it’s the coming of summer and it’s what will eventually completely transform that icescape,” he says. “It’s about stepping out into another world, where wilderness becomes the wildest, and the most extreme, and the most remote, and the most uninhabited. And it’s not even permanent.”
All photos by Jean de Pomereu