Tristan Duke: Glacial Optics

Using lenses made of Antarctic ice, Glacial Optics explores Tristan Duke's ongoing, innovative photographic project documenting our current moment of climate precarity. 

In 2022, artist Tristan Duke set sail for the remote arctic island of Svalbard, where he sought to find ancient glacier ice clear enough to make into functioning camera lenses. Since returning from the Arctic, using an array of custom-built cameras and other experimental photographic techniques, Duke has turned his ice lenses to sites of ecological destruction while documenting the efforts of climate scientists as they race to understand the big picture.

This adventure has taken the artist to the aftermath of drought induced wildfires, where he discovered unexpected photographic properties of his melting ice lenses; to the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility, where he created photograms of the oldest ice ever discovered (4 million years old); and to the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, where he handled the last remaining ice core samples from glaciers which have already completely melted.

Examining climate change through innovative, alternative uses of the photographic medium, the artist casts the camera directly into our changing landscapes, lenses shifting with the environment.