Tristan Duke: Glacial Optics

Using camera lenses made of Arctic ice, Tristan Duke's ongoing, experimental photographic project, Glacial Optics, explores our current moment of climate crisis.

In the spring of 2022, artist Tristan Duke set sail for the Arctic Island of Svalbard, the fastest-warming place on the planet. His goal was to craft functioning camera lenses from the very ice of the glaciers. Through melting ice lenses, Duke captured portraits of an Arctic landscape in quiet turmoil. These ephemeral lenses became the foundation for a photographic series imagining the "gaze of the glazier" as a means of confronting the global climate emergency.

On returning from the Arctic, Duke turned his ice-lens camera to document massive wildfires raging across the American West — bringing the melting glaciers to bear witness to the smoke and fire of the Anthropocene.

Next, Duke traveled the country visiting labs where scientists study glacier ice for clues to better predict our climate future. By laying ice core samples directly on large sheets of photo paper, Duke created photograms, distilling the concept of the ice lens into formal studies of light moving through ice.

Glacial Optics includes essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Brandee Caoba, with a foreword from Michael Govan, as well as the artist's field notes and original research chronicling the unlikely history of ice lenses.