“Entering Ilulissat Icefjord, Late Afternoon” reveals a fantastical scene through the round porthole of a 1980s Polish-built arctic tour boat.
The icy ruins of an ancient civilization? Boulders tossed by a mythical giant? A lunar landscape in a Cold War moon landing? No, it’s just Earth 12 years ago. About 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland.
But it’s the only Earth we have, Mark Seth Lender seems to be saying in a new photography exhibit at Artevistica in Chester. “The End of The Ice” showcases powerful, stark images of the planet’s furthest latitudes. We see polar icecaps; we see their entire ecosystem — animal, mineral, rock — rapidly morphing. And we see the ice disappearing. Lender’s photographs, curated from dozens of treks to the poles, demonstrate this transformation over the course of only 12 years.
As someone who’s spent untold time, resources and a few frost-bitten toes photographing the Earth’s extremities over the last 12 years, Lender admits that the contrast between the planet’s immense power and its immense fragility is a painful catch-22.
“This is the hardest lesson in life to learn: that we lose everything,” he notes.
In “Entering Ilulissat Icefjord, Late Afternoon,” the porthole covering of the tour boat is beat up and weathered. Frost is creeping through the seams of the canvas. The image is slightly discomforting; clearly the ship is itself a fragile oasis in the relentless sub-zero environment. But paradoxically, this is the real story: the Earth is warming at an alarming rate. Here at the poles, glaciers are rapidly collapsing, birthing “calves” or icebergs that float into the ever-rising sea level.
The knowledge of this story lends poignancy to a stunning collection of photographs. Lender draws you into his world of crystallized theme and variation; here are endless varieties of ice — in texture, color, and relationship to sky and water. With a sense of theater, Lender captures images of ice with real dimension and character.
In “Tabular Iceberg” from 2015, a flat-topped iceberg the size of Central Park sails off the Larson Ice Shelf on the east coast of Antarctica. Lender describes this crew-cut, compressed iceberg as a “bad boy.” In “Impresssioni del Viale di Notte” from 2013, an iceberg floats between the blackness of sky and sea, illuminated from within by a queenly majesty.
What life can endure in such stark, light-and-dark-shot environments? A whole ecosystem of wildlife threatened by the climate melt — including polar bears, penguins, walruses, seals, birds, fish and caribou. They appear in Lender’s exhibit as another vivid cast of characters. Each photograph tells a story in movement, texture, color: a king penguin dances in the rain in ecstasy, a one-ton walrus shows off stances of display, and a polar bear investigates a boatload of mysterious humans. Lender describes the scene:
“She saw our boat from a kilometer away. She was lying on the ice like this: ‘Uh, I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.’ She’d just eaten a seal. She’s got blood on her muzzle; she hadn’t even cleaned off yet. She looked out and saw us. She’d never seen people. She’d seen boats before, I think, because the boat didn’t impress her — but the people. She starts coming over, licking water on the way, a nervous displacement behavior. The bilge pump goes off, she shies away — she comes back. And finally she comes up beside us. She’s 8 feet tall. She stood up like a squirrel: ‘What kind of bear are you?'”
Lender is a linguist and anthropologist by education.
“The participant-observer fieldwork sort of technique applies directly to wildlife. Because what I do is, I don’t hide. I make a point of letting them see me. I don’t go towards animals, but I stand there. So they choose the level of interaction,” he says.
Lender came to photography later in life. He worked as a self-taught goldsmith on Martha’s Vineyard for 14 years. Later, he began writing about nature; he is currently a member of the collaborative writing and broadcasting team for the NPR radio show, “Living on Earth.” His photography — an amateur albeit passionate pursuit — became part of his journalism. But this is Lender’s first exhibit where the images “have been allowed to stand completely on their own,” he says.
The most arresting photographs of the exhibit juxtapose elemental colors and textures: cloud systems moving over mountains in “After The Storm: Antarctic Peninsula” from 2015, jewel-like color contrasts in “The Necklace: Ceylon Sapphire Ice on Black Lava Sand” from 2014. Humans appear only once: as tiny specks in a vast ice-and-water landscape in “Fishing for Turbot” from 2013, where a small fishing boat is circled by a towering mountain of iceberg.
There’s one photograph that shows the majesty of the elements right here on the Shoreline. In “Storm Approaching Long Island Sound, 2018,” a composite photograph stretches along forty miles of Connecticut shoreline; the horizon is sandwiched by a stark line of ocean and a smudge of swift-moving storm front. Birds fly out in advance, as if bearing a message.
“The End of the Ice” shares exhibit space at Artivistica in Chester with Valerie Pettis’ “Water + Color.” The gallery is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 12 to 5 p.m.
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