Photographs from the Ends of the Earth
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee
www.mam.org
Through December 24
By Graeme Reid
Even today, the thing that strikes you most in the high Arctic is
the silence. What we in southeastern Wisconsin consider silent
or quiet is actually saturated with ambient noise: the wind, the
rustle of leaves, cars, kids, a radio playing in a car as it drives
by. In the silence is pure and it overwhelmed me in 1998 when I
visited my brother Dave in Pond Inlet, located 600 miles inside
the Arctic Circle at the top of Baffin Island. Lying awake in bed
at 2:00 a.m. one night (if you can call it night when it’s bright
daylight outside), with the town of 1200 souls slumbering
peacefully and the bedroom windows covered with aluminum foil
to block the ever-present May sun, I listened – hard – and
heard nothing. Occasionally a snowmobile buzzed by in the
distance, then total silence reigned once more. This
envelopment of tranquility was even more profound a few days
later when I traveled to the floe edge – where the ice meets
open water. Sleeping in tents 60 miles from town, all of our
snowmobiles lay idle, and we were entombed in the arctic
stillness.
This stillness is present and captured in the Milwaukee Art
Museum’s current photography show Photographs from the
Ends of the Earth. Curated by Lisa Hostetler, the MAM’s
associate curator of photographs, from the holdings of the
American Geographical Society of the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, it is simultaneously a lesson in plus ça change, plus
c’est la méme chose – the more things change, the more they
stay the same – as well as a dramatic reminder that the natural
wonders and resources of our planet are both relatively new to
our comprehension and yet so vulnerable to our behavior; while
things may look like they don’t change, they are doing so in
subtle and detrimental ways.
When John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson boarded the
SS Panther and struggled bravely northwards in 1869 carrying
their new fangled photographic equipment, the silence must
have been profound, even in an age that was yet to experience
cars, planes and recorded music. Perhaps more unnerving
than the quiet must have been the sense of isolation and
adventure into the unknown. Their wooden ship was a veritable
eggshell against the powerful ice floes and the crew would have
been reluctantly mindful of past expeditions that had vanished
without trace or suffered dramatic personnel losses to the frigid
temperatures. (Sir John Franklin and the crew from two ships
disappeared without a trace in 1847 and there are still lonely
graves of whales that dot the landscape). The subsequent
photographs taken by the two pioneers were published in two
books: The Land of Desolation (1872, featuring engravings, not
original prints) and The Arctic Regions: Illustrated with
Photographs Taken on an Art Expedition to Greenland (1874).
Small in scale, these toned images capture the majestic
barrenness of the arctic and the overwhelming sense of
inferiority and vulnerability these explorers must have felt.
Count Hans Wilczek went into the Arctic on board the SS Isbjorn
in 1872. His images have a greater awareness of aesthetics
than Dunmore and Critcherson, revealing that in the hands of
some practitioners, photography was more than just a tool for
recording what was physically there, but a sense of what was
there.
Another expedition in the late 1920s which involved both ships
and airplanes, saw George Hubert Wilkins taking pictures and
his panorama photo from 1928-29, Schlossbach and Myers on
Deck, showing pack ice brilliantly captures this sense of
adventure, bordering on foolhardiness, that these men
undertook. The bow of the ship juts out above a seemingly
endless expanse of ice; one can almost hear the clunk and
thud of the bow against the visible and invisible chunks of ice.
Of all the images in this show, this one perhaps better
encapsulates man’s incessant quest to better understand and
know this earth in an age when many areas remained
mysterious. While today, we know so much more thanks to
satellite imagery, this inescapable element of nature dwarfing
man still exists and is exemplified in Stuart Klipper’s Tail of Herc
719, Spryte Vehicle, South Polar Plateau, 1989. The tracked
passenger vehicle looks like a fabricated toy next to the
airplane’s tail section. Even in their modest format, Klipper’s
work majestically captures the sheer scale of Antarctica.
I had my own experience of being utterly insignificant in this
environment when one day I (foolishly) buzzed around on my
own by snowmobile. Unused to a timetable dictated not by a
clock but the vagaries of an omnipresent sun, I grew restless
and went exploring. The Inuit I was camping with on a hunting
expedition were content to remain at their base on Bylot Island,
Lily watching the kids and Sam waiting for the right time to hunt
caribou. A few miles from camp and momentarily unable to
distinguish the immediate topography of my surroundings due
to flat light, I rode off a six foot high ledge. The machine
stopped on its side, throwing me headlong into the snow. For
what seemed like an eternity I struggled to right the machine,
hoping it would restart. Finally, I got it upright and, covered in
sweat despite the cold and numerous layers of clothing, I
started the machine and rode slowly and gingerly, back to
camp. For a moment I was alone in an unfamiliar world,
disoriented and scared. Yes, Sam would have eventually come
looking for me, but as I look at many of the older photographs
in this show, I have an inkling of some of the feelings they must
have felt, particularly Shackleton’s men waiting for him to return.
Upon my return to camp, I sheepishly said nothing of my
adventure, melding back into some traditional Inuit lifestyle:
caribou stew (made fresh from recently slaughtered ca
ribou whose entrails still stained the ground red), char chowder
(the just-caught fishes had lain as stiff as 2”x 4”s until thrown
into the skillet) and bits of char meat nibbled from thin slices of
fish skin. This was traditional fare from the land and I ate every
meal with relish. Did I have a choice? No. I didn’t care as I was
instantly given a lesson in survival from the land and the
endurance of tradition. Most food is flown in and as a
consequence outrageously expensive; there is plenty of seal,
caribou and whale to be had for those still willing to hunt. When
Sam went out in search of food, he slipped on his sealskin
boots; when Lily went about her daily business, she wore a
traditional parka where the hood served double duty: keeping
her head warm, or, if not required, offering a handy place to
stow a kid. Those buggies don’t roll so well in thick snow.
This show features several images by Dunmore and
Critcherson as well as Donald B. MacMillan or Edwin S. Brooke
Jnr. that amply demonstrate that the more things change, the
more they stay the same. The portraits by the former pair show
a Kalak Bone Carpenter and his Wife (Albumen silver print from
glass negative, c.1869). While they look bewildered and
distracted in front of a makeshift blanket backdrop, their
clothing and physiognomy have changed little in the intervening
150 years or the 1500 before that. Knud Rasmussen’s [Men
and sledge] and [Three Eskimos] (Gelatin silver print, 1921-24)
show repairs being made to a komatik (sledge) by men wearing
traditional clothing with dogs hanging about in the background.
When I stepped off the plane in Pond Inlet and went for a walk,
a komatik full of kids and pulled by a full team of dogs glided by.
Snowmobiles break down. Gas and spare parts are expensive.
Dogs can be “fed off the land” for free and the wooden
komatiks are simply constructed with wood and rope, making
repairs easy. Nails don’t work too well when the temperature is
below zero and the terrain continually twists and jars the long
sleds. This adherence to time-honored ways of doing things is
not done out of perversity in the face of modern improvements,
they simply work better. This is starkly brought home in Lt.
Henry R. Bowers’s photo of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed crew
of 1910-12. The men stand dressed in what was undoubtedly
the best-available-at-the-time gear, but to us its mixture of wool
and canvas seem wholly inadequate even for a Wisconsin
winter. It is unfortunate that their arrogance cost them so dear;
Robert E. Peary, who made several trips to the arctic between
1898 and 1902 wisely acknowledged that maybe the natives
knew a thing or two and employed dogs, indigenous clothing
and advisors. On the way back from our Bylot trip we met
another family going outbound; one little girl wore a romper suit
made completely from caribou skin. (Incidentally, 23Peary’s
taped commentary is available in the gallery, but a tad
distracting when one wants to enjoy the images in silence).
Even today, with almost twenty years Arctic experience under
his belt, my brother still takes Inuit guides with him on trips. In
addition to being allowed to carry guns (polar bears can get a
bit inquisitive when hungry) the Inuit simply have a sixth sense
for the weather and an ability to read the ice that no white man
can match.
While modern technologies of satellite photography, air travel,
icebreaker ships and developments in adequate clothing to
combat the extreme temperatures have eliminated much of the
remoteness, risks, time and hardship of travel to the arctic,
photographs like Dunmore and Critcherson’s could still, to a
great extent, be taken today. Contemporary artist Rena Bass
Forman’s gorgeous toned gelatin silver prints, taken in 2001
and 2003, are perfect examples of this. Other than being
primarily concerned with aesthetics rather than documentary
and being printed to a size unimaginable in the 1860s, their
subject matter is timeless. Diane Cook’s two large format
images straddle the aesthetic/documentary line but lack the
appeal of both the 19th century works or even that of Forman;
ironically, in a place so cold, the warmth of the timed prints is
more appealing than Cook’s black and white images which
seem stark and harsh.
If there is one salient lesson of this exhibition it is that there are
still places on this globe, both north and south, that have
retained their magnificently inhospitable nature to man. What is
alarming however, is the indirect impact man is having through
global warming as ice sheets shrink and glaciers melt and
crumble. Stuart Klipper’s Ross Ice Shelf photo from 1992 is a
stunning image that belies man’s impact. On the surface we see
a vast, apparently limitless expanse of ice, devoid of anything
but frozen water. How can something so big be destroyed one
might ask? If a little is lost, there’s still so much! While the
caribou in Subhanker Banerjee’s large format Caribou
Migration I (Digital chromogenic print, 2007) look like ants on
the vast white expanse, as they follow time-tested and
established migration patterns. At what point does man’s
arrogance and inexhaustible greed for oil determine that all
other creatures and their habits are expendable? This is the
careless, smug, selfish attitude that will only serve to convince
governments to ignore global warming and the earth’s fragile
ecosystem until it is too late. Both images are at once
deceptively reassuring and a resolute call for conservation. In
the 1860s when Dunmore and Critcherson went north, the
industrial revolution was but a flea bite on the world’s climate;
today, global warming bites like a massive snake: slowly and
methodically it eats its prey with a very difficult extraction
process.
Even if you have never been to the Arctic or Antarctic (brother
Dave has been to both), this terrific show is a wakeup call that
man has only really known this planet intimately for a relatively
short time, yet in that time span has managed to perhaps
irreparably damage it beyond repair. The old images are
exciting, fascinating and beautiful as are the modern ones, but
the lessons they offer are cautionary. While the Inuit love their
soda, satellite TV and snowmobiles, they are inherently in tune
with their environment and will suffer for the developed world’s
excesses; unfortunately for many of us they are out of sight and
out of mind. We still have much to learn and less and less time
to do it in.
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee
www.mam.org
Through December 24
By Graeme Reid
Even today, the thing that strikes you most in the high Arctic is
the silence. What we in southeastern Wisconsin consider silent
or quiet is actually saturated with ambient noise: the wind, the
rustle of leaves, cars, kids, a radio playing in a car as it drives
by. In the silence is pure and it overwhelmed me in 1998 when I
visited my brother Dave in Pond Inlet, located 600 miles inside
the Arctic Circle at the top of Baffin Island. Lying awake in bed
at 2:00 a.m. one night (if you can call it night when it’s bright
daylight outside), with the town of 1200 souls slumbering
peacefully and the bedroom windows covered with aluminum foil
to block the ever-present May sun, I listened – hard – and
heard nothing. Occasionally a snowmobile buzzed by in the
distance, then total silence reigned once more. This
envelopment of tranquility was even more profound a few days
later when I traveled to the floe edge – where the ice meets
open water. Sleeping in tents 60 miles from town, all of our
snowmobiles lay idle, and we were entombed in the arctic
stillness.
This stillness is present and captured in the Milwaukee Art
Museum’s current photography show Photographs from the
Ends of the Earth. Curated by Lisa Hostetler, the MAM’s
associate curator of photographs, from the holdings of the
American Geographical Society of the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, it is simultaneously a lesson in plus ça change, plus
c’est la méme chose – the more things change, the more they
stay the same – as well as a dramatic reminder that the natural
wonders and resources of our planet are both relatively new to
our comprehension and yet so vulnerable to our behavior; while
things may look like they don’t change, they are doing so in
subtle and detrimental ways.
When John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson boarded the
SS Panther and struggled bravely northwards in 1869 carrying
their new fangled photographic equipment, the silence must
have been profound, even in an age that was yet to experience
cars, planes and recorded music. Perhaps more unnerving
than the quiet must have been the sense of isolation and
adventure into the unknown. Their wooden ship was a veritable
eggshell against the powerful ice floes and the crew would have
been reluctantly mindful of past expeditions that had vanished
without trace or suffered dramatic personnel losses to the frigid
temperatures. (Sir John Franklin and the crew from two ships
disappeared without a trace in 1847 and there are still lonely
graves of whales that dot the landscape). The subsequent
photographs taken by the two pioneers were published in two
books: The Land of Desolation (1872, featuring engravings, not
original prints) and The Arctic Regions: Illustrated with
Photographs Taken on an Art Expedition to Greenland (1874).
Small in scale, these toned images capture the majestic
barrenness of the arctic and the overwhelming sense of
inferiority and vulnerability these explorers must have felt.
Count Hans Wilczek went into the Arctic on board the SS Isbjorn
in 1872. His images have a greater awareness of aesthetics
than Dunmore and Critcherson, revealing that in the hands of
some practitioners, photography was more than just a tool for
recording what was physically there, but a sense of what was
there.
Another expedition in the late 1920s which involved both ships
and airplanes, saw George Hubert Wilkins taking pictures and
his panorama photo from 1928-29, Schlossbach and Myers on
Deck, showing pack ice brilliantly captures this sense of
adventure, bordering on foolhardiness, that these men
undertook. The bow of the ship juts out above a seemingly
endless expanse of ice; one can almost hear the clunk and
thud of the bow against the visible and invisible chunks of ice.
Of all the images in this show, this one perhaps better
encapsulates man’s incessant quest to better understand and
know this earth in an age when many areas remained
mysterious. While today, we know so much more thanks to
satellite imagery, this inescapable element of nature dwarfing
man still exists and is exemplified in Stuart Klipper’s Tail of Herc
719, Spryte Vehicle, South Polar Plateau, 1989. The tracked
passenger vehicle looks like a fabricated toy next to the
airplane’s tail section. Even in their modest format, Klipper’s
work majestically captures the sheer scale of Antarctica.
I had my own experience of being utterly insignificant in this
environment when one day I (foolishly) buzzed around on my
own by snowmobile. Unused to a timetable dictated not by a
clock but the vagaries of an omnipresent sun, I grew restless
and went exploring. The Inuit I was camping with on a hunting
expedition were content to remain at their base on Bylot Island,
Lily watching the kids and Sam waiting for the right time to hunt
caribou. A few miles from camp and momentarily unable to
distinguish the immediate topography of my surroundings due
to flat light, I rode off a six foot high ledge. The machine
stopped on its side, throwing me headlong into the snow. For
what seemed like an eternity I struggled to right the machine,
hoping it would restart. Finally, I got it upright and, covered in
sweat despite the cold and numerous layers of clothing, I
started the machine and rode slowly and gingerly, back to
camp. For a moment I was alone in an unfamiliar world,
disoriented and scared. Yes, Sam would have eventually come
looking for me, but as I look at many of the older photographs
in this show, I have an inkling of some of the feelings they must
have felt, particularly Shackleton’s men waiting for him to return.
Upon my return to camp, I sheepishly said nothing of my
adventure, melding back into some traditional Inuit lifestyle:
caribou stew (made fresh from recently slaughtered ca
ribou whose entrails still stained the ground red), char chowder
(the just-caught fishes had lain as stiff as 2”x 4”s until thrown
into the skillet) and bits of char meat nibbled from thin slices of
fish skin. This was traditional fare from the land and I ate every
meal with relish. Did I have a choice? No. I didn’t care as I was
instantly given a lesson in survival from the land and the
endurance of tradition. Most food is flown in and as a
consequence outrageously expensive; there is plenty of seal,
caribou and whale to be had for those still willing to hunt. When
Sam went out in search of food, he slipped on his sealskin
boots; when Lily went about her daily business, she wore a
traditional parka where the hood served double duty: keeping
her head warm, or, if not required, offering a handy place to
stow a kid. Those buggies don’t roll so well in thick snow.
This show features several images by Dunmore and
Critcherson as well as Donald B. MacMillan or Edwin S. Brooke
Jnr. that amply demonstrate that the more things change, the
more they stay the same. The portraits by the former pair show
a Kalak Bone Carpenter and his Wife (Albumen silver print from
glass negative, c.1869). While they look bewildered and
distracted in front of a makeshift blanket backdrop, their
clothing and physiognomy have changed little in the intervening
150 years or the 1500 before that. Knud Rasmussen’s [Men
and sledge] and [Three Eskimos] (Gelatin silver print, 1921-24)
show repairs being made to a komatik (sledge) by men wearing
traditional clothing with dogs hanging about in the background.
When I stepped off the plane in Pond Inlet and went for a walk,
a komatik full of kids and pulled by a full team of dogs glided by.
Snowmobiles break down. Gas and spare parts are expensive.
Dogs can be “fed off the land” for free and the wooden
komatiks are simply constructed with wood and rope, making
repairs easy. Nails don’t work too well when the temperature is
below zero and the terrain continually twists and jars the long
sleds. This adherence to time-honored ways of doing things is
not done out of perversity in the face of modern improvements,
they simply work better. This is starkly brought home in Lt.
Henry R. Bowers’s photo of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed crew
of 1910-12. The men stand dressed in what was undoubtedly
the best-available-at-the-time gear, but to us its mixture of wool
and canvas seem wholly inadequate even for a Wisconsin
winter. It is unfortunate that their arrogance cost them so dear;
Robert E. Peary, who made several trips to the arctic between
1898 and 1902 wisely acknowledged that maybe the natives
knew a thing or two and employed dogs, indigenous clothing
and advisors. On the way back from our Bylot trip we met
another family going outbound; one little girl wore a romper suit
made completely from caribou skin. (Incidentally, 23Peary’s
taped commentary is available in the gallery, but a tad
distracting when one wants to enjoy the images in silence).
Even today, with almost twenty years Arctic experience under
his belt, my brother still takes Inuit guides with him on trips. In
addition to being allowed to carry guns (polar bears can get a
bit inquisitive when hungry) the Inuit simply have a sixth sense
for the weather and an ability to read the ice that no white man
can match.
While modern technologies of satellite photography, air travel,
icebreaker ships and developments in adequate clothing to
combat the extreme temperatures have eliminated much of the
remoteness, risks, time and hardship of travel to the arctic,
photographs like Dunmore and Critcherson’s could still, to a
great extent, be taken today. Contemporary artist Rena Bass
Forman’s gorgeous toned gelatin silver prints, taken in 2001
and 2003, are perfect examples of this. Other than being
primarily concerned with aesthetics rather than documentary
and being printed to a size unimaginable in the 1860s, their
subject matter is timeless. Diane Cook’s two large format
images straddle the aesthetic/documentary line but lack the
appeal of both the 19th century works or even that of Forman;
ironically, in a place so cold, the warmth of the timed prints is
more appealing than Cook’s black and white images which
seem stark and harsh.
If there is one salient lesson of this exhibition it is that there are
still places on this globe, both north and south, that have
retained their magnificently inhospitable nature to man. What is
alarming however, is the indirect impact man is having through
global warming as ice sheets shrink and glaciers melt and
crumble. Stuart Klipper’s Ross Ice Shelf photo from 1992 is a
stunning image that belies man’s impact. On the surface we see
a vast, apparently limitless expanse of ice, devoid of anything
but frozen water. How can something so big be destroyed one
might ask? If a little is lost, there’s still so much! While the
caribou in Subhanker Banerjee’s large format Caribou
Migration I (Digital chromogenic print, 2007) look like ants on
the vast white expanse, as they follow time-tested and
established migration patterns. At what point does man’s
arrogance and inexhaustible greed for oil determine that all
other creatures and their habits are expendable? This is the
careless, smug, selfish attitude that will only serve to convince
governments to ignore global warming and the earth’s fragile
ecosystem until it is too late. Both images are at once
deceptively reassuring and a resolute call for conservation. In
the 1860s when Dunmore and Critcherson went north, the
industrial revolution was but a flea bite on the world’s climate;
today, global warming bites like a massive snake: slowly and
methodically it eats its prey with a very difficult extraction
process.
Even if you have never been to the Arctic or Antarctic (brother
Dave has been to both), this terrific show is a wakeup call that
man has only really known this planet intimately for a relatively
short time, yet in that time span has managed to perhaps
irreparably damage it beyond repair. The old images are
exciting, fascinating and beautiful as are the modern ones, but
the lessons they offer are cautionary. While the Inuit love their
soda, satellite TV and snowmobiles, they are inherently in tune
with their environment and will suffer for the developed world’s
excesses; unfortunately for many of us they are out of sight and
out of mind. We still have much to learn and less and less time
to do it in.
Full Moon Edition No. 2 11.24.07
| Copyright 2007 Art History Chicks LLC |
| George Hubert Wilkins, Schlossbach and Myers on Deck. |
| Stuart Klipper, Tail of Herc 719, Spryte Vehicle, South Polar Plateau, 1989. |
| Portraits by Dunmore and Critcherson. |
| Subhander Banerjee, Caribou Migration I, 2007. |
| SEARCH THIS SITE |
SEARCH THIS SITE is
case sensitive, so be sure
to use capitalization where
needed.
case sensitive, so be sure
to use capitalization where
needed.
Sign up for email updates
