Artist Statement
When I Am Laid In Earth
Mapping with a pyrograph, the melting away of the Lewis Glacier on Mt. Kenya. These fire lines I have drawn indicate where the front of the rapidly disappearing Lewis Glacier was at various times in the recent past; the years are given in the titles. In the distance, a harvest moon lights the poor, doomed glacier remnant; the gap between the fire and the ice represents the relentless melting. Relying on old maps and modern GPS surveys I have rendered a stratified history of the glacier’s retreat. Photographing time’s thickness, trying to expose it’s ‘layeredness,’ is something I’ve been attempting in different settings and through different channels for the last dozen years.
It seems entirely appropriate to make these images here. Mount Kenya is the eroded stump of a long-dead, mega volcano. Photographically, I hope to re-awaken its angry, magma heart. The mountain has an especially fierce demeanour, the peaks are childishly sheer and ragged, and since I first saw them I’ve been thinking of Gormenghast and Tolkien. The ‘Fire vs. Ice’ metaphor I employ is especially delicious for me. My fire is made from petroleum. My pictures contain no evidence that this glacier’s retreat is due to man-made warming (glaciers can retreat when the don’t get sufficient snow, or if the cloud cover thins, for example,) but it is nonetheless my belief that humans burning hydrocarbons are substantially to blame.
But there are romantic reasons to be here too. To be next to the ice is to feel privileged: like you are beside a colossal, sleeping giant. I imagine being close to a darted bullelephant feels the same and I’m reminded of a 17th century Dutch painting of bewildered burghers contemplating a beached whalefish. Close-up one senses the immensity of the ice mass, its coiled, dormant energy and its colossal longevity. And, of course, the glacier’s cold, resigned indifference. One is chilled by an overwhelming feeling of one’s own smallness and transience. Englishmen have been feeling this way about mountains for 300 years, since Romantic, Grand-Tour travellers first astonished Swiss inn keepers with the request for help in climbing to the heights. Nobody had done that before; for the fun of it, because it made you feel whole, because it fed the soul.
Another Englishman on another mountain. History repeats, but this time as tragedy. To think that in ten or twelve years this magnificent glacier that has endured for millennia will exist only in photographs, is unbearable. The feeling I have for the losing of the Lewis can only be called ‘grief.’
So, see it now before it’s gone: get over there quick before Mount Kenya is just an unadorned rocky stump, robbed of it’s innocent, frozen crown. Unless of course you feel that flying around the world injecting tonnes of hot CO2 into the troposphere in order to witness the melting of Africa’s glaciers, is just a little too ironic.
—//—
The artist would like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by Project Pressure in the making of this work, and the technical help with GPS mapping.
Shroud
The English Romantic artists and poets of the 18th century treated the mountains of Switzerland
like a laboratory, a classroom and a high pulpit from which to address the world. They went there
to defrost their aristocratic hearts, to learn how to feel and to get lifted, elevated, taken to
Sublimity. This is where they honed their passions and their commitment to the world and I
followed in their snowy footprints to examine what climate change has brought in the centre of
Europe.
These days, summer in the high Alps is an iceless, greyer, rockier place. Glacier snouts have retreated
kilometres from their line in old photographs. The lake that now sits in front of the half-
disappeared Rhone Glacier in southern Switzerland is so new a local newspaper ran a competition to give it a name.
The Rhone Glacier’s retreat is matched by most others but in one respect it is unique. The road
over the Furka Pass runs close to the glacier’s flank. There’s enough passing traffic in the summer
to sustain a small business that carves an ice grotto into the glacier each year and charges tourists
to experience inside the blue ice. One is used to thinking of a glacier as a blob in the landscape,
like a forest or a lake: it’s “just there.” But this glacier is at work: a commercial enterprise; a glacier
‘experience’ for ticket-buying tourists. They enter from the coach park and exit through the gift
shop. The same family (the Carstens) have been making a living from the glacier for four
generations. Its melting matters to them financially so they have invested heavily in a special
thermal-blanket for the glacier that has kept about 25m (in depth) of ice from disappearing and
has kept the ice grotto in business. There are other, non-working glaciers over the valley: they
disappear unvisited and unmourned.
After a dozen winters on the mountain the blanket is starting to show the effect of the harsh
climate up there. The glacier looks like it is being wrapped in preparation for its own funeral. This
Life/Death state- change is fascinating. When photographed the shroud recalls Carrara marble
which traditionally in western art has been used by the greatest artists to turn a lifeless stone block
into the flowing liveliness of Sculpture. The ice of a glacier is made of nothing more than water
but looks and feels like diamond-hard rock. At a glance the glacier may seem lifeless (mortified),
but with time and the power of ice the strongest rocks on earth are plastic and as carve-able as
butter. Everything there is dynamic, you just need to set your clock to a slower tick. This glacier,
which has existed for millennia will die within the lifetime of children born today. None of the
physics of our regular, little lives seems to be quite reliable when we get up there at high altitude,
at greater pressure and at much, much longer timespans. To photograph it I deployed a special
light hanging from a helium balloon – ‘portable moonlight:’ top lit, sepulchral. I wanted to
recreate the same light you’d need for a mortuary slab.
But it is the gesture that fascinates me; there is something oafish about trying to reverse the
unstoppable. It has only been done here (expensively, temporarily, quixotically) because this is a
working glacier. This intervention is, of course, not scaleable: we cannot do this to all the world’s
ice. The gesture is filled with grace and beauty, but is as forlorn and doomed as the glacier itself.
About
Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer whose work over twenty years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word ‘battlefield’ in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world’s worst war-zones and refugee crises, but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or the test-launching of nuclear missiles. Time’s layeredness in the landscape is an ongoing fascination of his.
His work has been widely recognised: he has won The Discovery Prize at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2005; The Infinity Prize from The International Center of Photography in 2004; and he was winner of the European Publishing Award, 2002. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Citibank Prize now known as the Deutsche Börse Prize and in 2013 he won the Prix Pictet Commission. He has won multiple World Press Photo and Sony World Photography awards.
He has produced four monographs of his work including ‘Afghanistan: Chronotopia’ (2002) which was published in five languages; ‘For Most Of It I Have No Words’ (1998) about the landscapes of genocide; and ‘Bleed’ (2005) about the war in Bosnia. His most recent is ‘Burke + Norfolk; Photographs from the War in Afghanistan.’ (2011).
He has work held in major collections such as The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Getty in Los Angeles as well as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wilson Centre for Photography and the Sir Elton John Collection. His work has been shown widely and internationally from Brighton to Ulaanbaatar and in 2011 his ‘Burke + Norfolk’ work was one of the first ever photography solo shows at Tate Modern in London.
He has been described by one critic as ‘the leading documentary photographer of our time. Passionate, intelligent and political; there is no one working in photography that has his vision or his clarity.’ He is currently running at a pretty nifty Number 44 on ‘The 55 Best Photographers of all Time. In the History of the World. Ever. Definitely.’
Simon Norfolk’s Shroud was made in collaboration with Klaus Thymann of Project Pressure, “a charity with a mission to visualize climate change.”
