Caleb Cain Marcus, a photographer living in New York City, became enchanted by thePeritoMoreno glacier of Patagonia in 2010.
He spent the next two years traveling to Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and Alaska to make the images that comprise “A Portrait of Ice,” recently published to critical acclaim by Damiani. Three images from the series were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Cain Marcus writes: “As the boat that crossed Lake Argentino swayed back and forth, I thought about the oppression created by the lack of a horizon in an urban environment and what would happen if there was no visible horizon in the open space. What would happen if it vanished?” So he toyed with the idea of shooting the glacial landscape as if it were a vertical city, with no earthbound orientation.
Cain Marcus scrambled across the Perito Moreno wearing homemade crampons fashioned by local guides to easily, and safely, traverse the type of ice that forms this glacier. Lost in utter silence, broken only by the crunch of frozen snow underfoot and the occasional clashing sound of the camera’s shutter, he tested his idea, frame after frame.
In his introduction to “A Portrait of Ice,” noted photography curator and editor Marvin Heiferman writes: “It is the painterly qualities of these stark images, as much as photographic ones, that makes the work seductive. The woozy atmospheric conditions that prevail look as if they are airbrushed or stippled in. Images of crenellated landscapes that evoke the surfaces of the brain or the moon, give the impression of being dusted with pigment, like pastels.”
