Why this photographer made a camera lens out of glacial ice

Glacial ice is formed from snow accumulating and compacting over millennia. As the pressure increases, crystalline layers are smoothed into one of the clearest substances found in nature. That alchemy—and the knowledge that climate change is causing glaciers to rapidly disappear—inspired 44-year-old artist Tristan Duke to create a photo lens out of glacial ice. “I just felt this real sense of urgency,” Duke says. He wanted to capture a glacier through its own “eye,” as he puts it, like a self-portrait.

In the spring of 2022, Duke hauled hundreds of pounds of gear to Svalbard, Norway, including a giant tent camera that he designed himself and molds for shaping the ice into lenses. The tent functioned like a camera obscura: Duke would place a palm-size piece of ice in a hole in the canvas, projecting an image of the landscape inside the tent that would then be captured on a 42-by-100-inch negative.

(A century ago, there was a race to make the first color photos. Now there’s a race to save them.)

Some of the photographs were clearer than he expected, but as the lenses melted, the accumulation of water produced its own effect. “People have told me that it looks like the world blurred through tears,” he says.

To contrast this Arctic sublime against a world on fire, he traveled through the American West to document wildfires and energy infrastructure with lenses created from locally sourced ice. He wants to invert the romantic gaze. “We see a sort of fragile nature bearing witness to the unbridled and cataclysmic power of the human world.”