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George Philip LeBourdais - Tracing The Arctic Regions: Mapping 19th-Century Photographs of Greenland Southern Spaces

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created2016-06-23
modified2020-01-07
released2016-06-23
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01:01:45
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southernspaces
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English
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"Tracing The Arctic Regions: Mapping 19th-Century Photographs of Greenland" a presentation by George Philip LeBourdais https://southernspaces.org/2016/tracing-arctic-regions-mapping-19th-century-photographs-greenland-0 Published June 30, 2016 George Philip LeBourdais discusses the work of painter and photographer William Bradford who explored the Arctic in 1869 and subsequently published his account of the journey in "The Arctic Regions" in 1873.
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linkhttps://vimeo.com/171940774
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It was the middle of August 1869,
but William Bradford sensed the icy grip of death on the air.
Raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Bradford
now found himself further north than he had ever
been from home.
In fact, at 75 degrees North latitude,
amidst the thick pack ice of Greenland's desolate Melville
Bay, he was sure that he was much further,
certainly, than anyone had ever ventured before
for the purposes of art, and quite as far as it was safe
to go, unless prepared to winter in the ice,
“which we were not.” Threatened all around by a deathly
stillness, their salvation relied on decisive movement.
The “we” to which Bradford referred were the 30 other
souls constituting the crew of the Panther,
a 350-ton steam barque outfitted for a
singular artistic journey to the Arctic seas.
Though the ship had formerly hunted northern sea animals,
and here I'm showing you a snippet of the mapping
project that will show you later,
but just to give you a sense of how far north they are,
you can see that's Melville Bay of Greenland
up in the center of the map right there.
Though the ship had formally hunted northern sea animals,
Bradford, regarded as America's bravest painter of the Arctic
and certainly one of its hairiest,
enlisted it in the pursuit of icebergs,
the slippery, shimmering forms for which his art had
become known.
To painters like Bradford, the Arctic promise subject matter
for the most sublime canvases, the chance
to render dramatic forms of icebergs in all
the colors of romantic light.
In the word of one reviewer, “Bradford's works form the most
instructive work on the frozen seas that has ever appeared.”
By reaching towards the nineteenth-century
artist-explorer ideal of studying extreme scenery
firsthand, Bradford now found himself in dire straits.
While he imagined the lifetime of sketches
that surrounding towers of bergs might fuel,
the crew tore into action.
“No time was to be lost,” Bradford wrote,
apparently recovering his sang froid.
The fires were opened, and the steam got up.
No time then, but still enough for John Dunmore and George
Critcherson, the art expedition’s official photographers,
to descend to the ice, burdened by large wooden view cameras,
traverse hundreds of feet of its shifting surface,
and then prepare and expose a few glass plate negatives.
With seasonal temperatures in Melville Bay never far
from the freezing point, the photographers
would have clinched and flexed their hands
in cold air as they manipulated frozen facets on the camera
and made the picture.
Could one imagine an image more aptly summoned,
that more aptly summon the ideal of frozen still?
Yet the ominous situation shown in the photograph
is nonetheless charged with a sense of imminent movement.
Rising from the flow ice, a massive iceberg
engulfs the horizon under an impenetrable gray sky.
The jagged, sculptural qualities of its walls
resemble a Gothic ruin in romantic light,
complete with a shadowy arc-awaited entrance
where the berg is carved away from the water.
Bradford called it “the Castle Berg.” Balancing this dark spot
of the composition is the Panther,
a mere contour against its grayscale surroundings
and, fittingly, black as soot.
Two tiny human silhouettes stand between the two dark masses,
indicators of scale but also witnesses
in an age when the natural world seemed constantly brought
low by the empire of the eye to the Arctic
is a place of still mortal danger.
The frozen masses that caused this danger
echoed the very medium that captures them.
In a photograph, the camera captures
whatever passes before the lens, freezing it into a still image.
Indeed, as water enters its solid icy phase
by forming into crystals, photographs
make images when light hits and transforms the halide crystals
and their emulsions.
Playing into the photographic novelty
of the expedition, Bradford highlighted this arrest
of movement, referring to some photographs as “instantaneous
views,” a phrasing that dashed the new technological speed
of the camera against this slow, geologic grind of the Arctic
landscape.
In fact, photographs earned Bradford credibility
on both sides of the Atlantic.
The London Art Journal praised the authenticity of his
efforts, writing, “Mr. Bradford's are the only works
which process inconvertible truth in the representation
of northern regions.” For nineteenth-century viewers,
after all, the photograph was sutured to truth.
Yet, one detail ruins the conception of perfect stillness
and the hard-edged authenticity to which
it was bound: this smear of black smoke
that runs from the Panther stack off to the right of the image.
Despite working with constant light
in the land of the midnight sun, the Boston
photographers Dunmore and Critcherson here
ran into the limits of their technology.
Exposure times for glass collodion negatives
of this size lasted at least a handful of seconds, sometimes
several minutes.
This image of the smoking ship thus results
as a contingent description, a fluid or slippery sign
rather than an objective measurement.
Or viewing the paradox of the instantaneous view more
broadly, seeing this live evidence,
the photographs cannot fail to designate outside of itself
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