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Tristan Duke
Artists Tristan Duke uses camera lenses made from ice to capture beautiful, eerie moments in the Arctic.
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Tristan Duke
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
In the poem above, Robert Frost imagines doomsday by assigning human traits of jealousy and passion, disinterest and hatred to seemingly opposing, non-sentient entities—fire and ice. Written in 1920, Frost’s poem predates the discovery of Antarctica’s Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier by several decades. Thwaites is called “Doomsday Glacier” because it’s melting at an alarmingly fast pace, shedding massive ice chunks into an ever-warming ocean. Within a couple hundred years, scientists say, Doomsday will melt entirely, causing disastrous changes to the world’s sea levels.
Glacial Optics, on view at SITE Santa Fe through March, features large-scale photographs by Los Angeles-based artist Tristan Duke. Duke’s previous works include holographic installations and handmade pinhole cameras; for this project, he replaced the glass lens of his camera with ice, most of it gathered from melting glaciers.
During a recent walk-through tour of the exhibition, Duke describes an “obsessive” fascination with glaciers.
“Glacial ice’s structure is unique because it’s constantly being compressed,” he says, “which forces out air bubbles and makes the ice unusually clear.”
Curious to know what it would be like to replace a human gaze with a glacial one, Duke headed to Svalbard, an Arctic Norwegian archipelago where some of the planet’s fastest-rising temperatures have been recorded. Here, he set up an insulated walk-in tent, which he transformed into a giant camera. Duke gathered ice from the surrounding tundra and shaped it into lenses, using molds of his own invention.
“Photography is deeply embedded in a narrative of technological progress,” Duke explains, “but the ice lens isn’t about progress—it’s about shifting perspective.”
In some ways, Duke says, his interest in ice began when he picked up an old Chinese book and came across the story of a third century alchemist who created fire using a ball of ice and reflected sunlight; later, Duke successfully recreated the alchemist’s experiment, resulting in a “union of opposites” that continues to inspire his work today. Glacial Optics might not be directly focused on man’s “technological progress,” according to Duke, but it sure does speak to its ingenuity.
As ice lenses melt, the images they capture become distorted. Duke leads the tour past photographs of sailboats, white-capped waves and a group of huddled human forms. In one composition, we can just make out the blurred contours of a sailing ship, moving unhurriedly through gauzy pink clouds and blue sea. On the opposing wall, black and white photos offer crisper visions of snowy climes. The camera’s narrowed, circular viewpoint feels strangely intimate: the portholed view of an ancient mariner, maybe.
Upon returning to the States, Duke reviewed his Arctic photos and grew concerned that they were too shrouded in mystery, too distant—too indomitable.
“I was taken aback by the romance of the images,” he explains. “I didn’t want them to feel remote or ‘other-worldly.’”
He pauses in front of a forest landscape.
“I wanted what I was photographing to be animate, to have agency—and to speak to the unchecked, cataclysmic impact of human life on Earth,” he adds.
In response, Duke headed to Colorado and New Mexico, where he photographed the aftermath of the Marshall and Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fires, respectively. Duke crafted lenses of local tap water, keeping them as cold as he could in scorching, post-blaze temperatures. Blurred, charred trees seem to huddle together in one image, their branches stark and scarred by flames. Because they are seen through melting lenses, Duke’s trees appear to swirl together, retreating from the viewer’s gaze.
SITE curator Brandee Caoba, who began planning Glacial Optics with Duke in 2021, says the show’s seemingly oppositional entities of ice and fire are united in depicting climate change’s far-reaching impacts.
“Tristan is tenacious,” Caoba says, “and he follows his curiosity and intuition. The photographs in Glacial Optics stand on their own, and can be enjoyed for their beauty, but they also disallow us from dismissing the reality of climate change.”
Towards the end of the tour, Duke stops in front of a black and white image of five vertical, translucent cylinders. These are ice cores, he tells us, extracted from dying glaciers near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in the 1970s and ’80s, and currently stored at a research lab in Ohio. Duke says some of earth’s glaciers have been around for millions of years, and act as remarkably accurate time-keepers. Pointing to a dark smudge in the bottom of one of the slim cylinders, he says, “This is a layer of compressed dust that accumulated 4,200 years ago, over a hundred-year period. It lines up with several major earth-changing events, like the drought that was responsible for bringing down Egypt’s Old Kingdom.”
Before the group disperses, someone asks about his future plans. Duke says he’s planning to continue documenting glaciers, and also mentions a new dream.
“Meteorites are fascinating to me,” he notes,” and I’d really love to be able to study them in depth.” Fire, ice, and now cosmic dust: For Tristan Duke, it’s all inexorably, ephemerally related.