From behind a magazine’s pages or a computer’s screen, it’s easy to underestimate why a photographer would endure pressing against the frozen rails of shaky, ice-cutting ships or packing tightly onto fragile, motorized floats to hunt for the Arctic’s greatest prey: icebergs. The landscape this far up north is a prefabricated work of art full of the photogenic, and the iceberg is its center piece. Simultaneously, their plain whiteness beautifully contrasts with the sky and waters, and their uniquely warped sculpture brings a completing complexity to the otherwise plain and predictable. No matter how inexperienced, travel to these waters and you are guaranteed some fantastic shots.
Yet these photographers — some of the world’s best and most serious — know how to see the ice so as to reveal its personalities in ways amateurs cannot. They know how to catch the bluest light easing through the ice, where to direct the floats’ conductors to frame their photos aesthetically and simply what time of day to shoot. Most importantly, master arctic photographers care about the ice and, as sometimes it feels, the ice for them.
But as godlike their command of the scenery is, arctic photographers can’t control the ice, not even for the camera’s sake. The photographers may influence how the world in front of them is fed into the lens — maneuvering the boat for an excellent shot or adjusting camera settings to adduce an iceberg’s personality — but they are still subject to nature’s whims.
If you ask them yourself, they will likely agree that this is simultaneously the most annoying and potentially most rewarding part of their work. With little to shoot but ice, wind and wave, a homogenous few days might leave them with an equally monotonous memory card. The oomph infusing elements don’t come soon enough, if they do at all. The uninviting landscape, for example, keeps much native fauna few and far between, which means that for the wildlife shot worth bragging about, it often makes little sense but to sit and wait.
And they do. They wait. And wait.
And if they’re lucky, the most marvelous things happen. Birds taking off in sun-blotting migratory flocks and colonies of walruses sunning, as numerous as the stones on their beach: the life to break the stillness of the cold. This is the stuff that graces National Geographic covers, the stuff that is worthy of Morgan Freeman’s narration.
But by far, the most awe-inspiring act of the northern seas can hardly be captured within the bounds of a photo. It does not help to wait. It just happens as the camera gazes futile. And it happens so rarely and sporadically, it can hardly be anticipated.
When the icebergs really come to life, when they roll and shift their million-ton centers of gravity, raise themselves hundreds of feet into the sky, calve and shed the last thousand years’ of surface ice and snow in mere seconds, dropping these pieces imperiously into the sea that sustains them and sending icy shrapnel and crashing waves into observers who must immediately flee; when they do all this and flip themselves over to reveal glossy underbellies hidden for thousands of years, even the most professional photographer is unable to capture the majesty of the moment. The best he might do is to suggest its power with the backsplash and spray of a massive drop or depict its magnitude in the rising, displacing swell of a surfacing iceberg.
Whatever tricks he uses, he cannot capture the slow intensity, the overwhelming steadiness, the thunderous bass vibrations even as the iceberg appears to collapse uncontrollably. He cannot capture how overwhelming is the metamorphosis.
It’s a humbling experience to be sure — for the arctic photographer even more so. She devotes her days and passions to reproducing the magic of the landscape in limited art form. And when that greatest magic of the landscape comes along — maybe the last time she’ll ever see — the camera feels especially futile a tool. It just has to suck.
And that could be the end of it.
But it doesn’t have to be. Among the photographically agnostic, she stands the chance to see the ice’s metamorphosis as fascinatedly as they who have not yet reimagined its raw beauty through the framing of a lens or the tainting measurement of personal ability. It is even, paradoxically, within this failed mission-goer’s unique ability to see it as a religious experience; the all-but-sovereign of the ice knows always the improbability of the iceberg’s display. She, queen of the arctic, must know deep in her mind in every instance she shoots that this is centuries-old unseen ice freed to the surface, that she is witnessing nothing less than a baptism of nature. However, this personal transformation, as momentous as that of the ice’s, is denied her until she suspends the photographer within and silences her own mastery.
Maybe you sensed the clichéd metaphor from the start. We, Duke students, master photographers, documenting our preferred landscape of knowledge and paradigms, striving to master what would give us merit to be in such a place of prestige, always narrowing in, as mastery demands, on our understanding and expertise, maybe even bringing out that knowledge’s beauty in a way no one else with the same facts could, confident in our skills and ourselves, patiently waiting the four years for that moment of perfect justification. When the berg flips and the cameras of our minds and mastery fail the picture, will we allow the overwhelming inversion of what we know to settle over us? Or will we refuse to feel small, insist on snapping away, and then grow inevitably infuriated at what frustrates our abilities to explain? The choice, which must always be made beforehand, only decides our ability to see an entire otherwise-inaccessible world underneath our feet. Choose correctly and a glimpse of the magical is ours. Insist on our mastery, and we blind ourselves.
This, I submit, is the test of a real education: the willingness to let a lifetime of learning go when the icebergs flip.
Antoniu Chirnoaga is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Fridays.
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