Now is the season when we start longing for ice. Daydreaming of it, in fact – anticipating the physical pleasure of it, the clink of it, the sting of chilled liquids on a parched throat, the frosty relief of air-conditioned rooms.
Photographer Marzena Pogorzaly’s black and white ice studies certainly have a cooling appeal, but it is the sheer drama of her images that waylays the onlooker, inviting us to ponder the transience and ineffability the polar regions have embodied for centuries.
Born in Poland, Pogorzaly grew up close to nature. The daughter of a forester, she describes an idyllic childhood spent among trees, while the woodlands, meadows and fields where she roamed with her brother offered rich foraging grounds for a youngster with naturalist leanings. But ultimately it was the sea and oceanographic studies that lured her away from her roots. When a friend suggested a stint at a Polish scientific station in Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago in the far north of Norway, she jumped at it. Her fascination with photographing ice would last a lifetime.
Four expeditions to the Antarctic followed, working as a freelance photographer alongside scientists aboard Royal Navy and British Antarctic Survey expeditions. A different kind of foraging took hold – capturing these mysterious, vanishing landscapes. After all, ice must melt.
The “mysterious other” has drawn explorers, writers, poets and artists to these zones of unreality for centuries; lifelong obsession is the price many have paid for the privilege of experiencing such spectral splendour. Describing in words what they have seen poses the greatest challenge for the polar obsessive. How does one convey its essence, the spirit of polar purity?
“It felt like being at the scene of Creation” Pogorzaly said of her time on the ice, when a meditative mindset is constantly challenged by a sense of urgency, a fear of missing something. The photographer is wholly present, bonded to the natural world. “Being there was one of the most intense peak experiences of my life.”
Awash with light yet shadowed, cleaved and faceted, Pogorzaly’s landscapes and icebergs are imbued with a luminosity both seductive and unsettling. Here is a place of stoicism and dignity, great beauty and terrible menace.
Humour is here too. The doomed heroism of the Viking ship setting forth undaunted towards warmer waters, hastening its own demise. Or the surrealism of one elegant hooved hind leg, smooth as marble, jutting from an arid white landscape – a wind-carved Michelangelo.
History inhabits these images. A lone figure casts a shadow across a vast landscape. You recall the great explorers and the intense restlessness that separated so many of them from society, their families, and their non-ice-bound lives. But this person is not an apparition. He or she is returning our gaze. Here is a scientist conducting research. Here is an intrepid tourist posing for a remarkable photo.
Our desire to find meaning in these enigmatic ice-scapes is a natural response to an environment whose hostility can take life away. Amid all that is pure and white in Pogorzaly’s images, there are the oily, dark waters and pitch-black skies that remind us that Antarctica and the Arctic are deadly.
Of course, the polar regions are under threat. Climate change, mass tourism and the peril of oil and gas exploitation have impacts far too complex to fully appreciate right now. Biodiversity and the pristine beauty of the environment will suffer. In sharing her work, Pogorzaly encourages us to value, protect and admire the planet’s most remote and fragile regions – but mostly to hold space for a moment in time.
Marzena Pogorzaly’s work will be on display at Ice House Gallery, Holland Park, London from 30 July until 7 August, as part of a group show on the theme of nature.
Visit marzenapogorzaly.com for more info
Joanna Grochowicz is a polar historian and author of several non-fiction children’s/YA novels about the human aspirations and tragedies of early polar exploration. Her latest, “Shackleton’s Endurance: an Antarctic Survival Story”, is out now
