Today we go #InDetail with Julian Charrière’s photograph Towards No Earthly Pole - Pionerskoe, 2019.
#JulianCharrière’s film, Towards No Earthly Pole, was conceived in 2017, when he was invited aboard a Russian research ship as part of the first Antarctic Biennale and sailed the Drake Passage between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands. The experience inspired subsequent research into equally remote and hostile climates including the Antarctic, Iceland and Greenland, the Aletsch and Rhone Glaciers, and Mont Blanc in Switzerland. The landscapes Charrière encountered have lost none of their alienating power and inhospitable character. Once there, the artist is, for all intents and purposes, a field worker. His missions were at times extremely challenging, but simultaneously provided the conditions in which true wonder can exist.
The video footage for the film, and the multiple images for the accompanying photographs, were recorded at night, the dazzling landscape of white snow and bright daylight that we generally see pictured, now presented in the dark. A spotlight carried by a drone revealed the massive landscape in snippets, limiting the range of vision and making it difficult to grasp the complexity of the topography in its entirety. The staggering shapes of ice sculpted by water and the wind appear in dazzling shades of blue, turquoise, azure, grey and white; their drama further heightened by the deep shadows they cast. Eerie sounds of cracking ice and water flowing remind us that this frozen landscape is very much alive, breathing, moving and constantly evolving.
Julian Charriere, Towards No Earthly Pole - Pionerskoe, 2019, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl, mounted on aluminum dibond, framed (alder), Mirogard anti-reflective glass, framed: 32 3/16 x 40 1/16 x 1 5/8 inches, edition of 5 with 1 AP