Longing for Ice

Perspective Magazine, July 2022

Now is the season when we start longing for ice. Daydreaming of it in fact, anticipating the physical pleasure of it, the clink of it, the sting of chilled liquids on a parched throat, the frosty relief offered by air-conditioned rooms.

Marzena Pogorzaly’s black and white ice studies certainly have a cooling appeal, but it is the drama of her images that waylays the viewer, tempting those with lyrical sensibilities to ponder not only the transience of all things but also the ineffability that the world’s polar regions have come to embody for mankind over the centuries.

Born in Poland, Pogorzaly grew up close to nature. The daughter of a forester, she describes an idyllic childhood spent among trees, while the woodlands, meadows and fields where she roamed with her brother offered rich foraging grounds for a youngster with naturalist leanings.

However ultimately it was the sea and oceanographic studies that tempted her from her roots. When a friend suggested a stint at a Polish scientific station in Svalbard, she jumped at it. Her fascination with photographing ice would last a lifetime.

Four expeditions to the Antarctic followed, working as an unaffiliated photographer alongside the scientists aboard Royal Navy and British Antarctic Survey expeditions and a different kind of foraging took hold – capturing the temporality of mysterious vanishing landscapes. After all, ice must melt.

The mysterious other has drawn countless explorers, writers, poets and artists to these zones of unreality; a lifelong obsession is the price that many have had to pay for the privilege of experiencing its spectral splendour. Describing it in words poses the greatest challenge for the polar obsessive. How does one convey its essence to others, or describe the spirit of polar purity without falling back on cliché?

‘It felt like being at the scene of Creation,’ she has said of her time on the ice when a meditative mindset is challenged constantly by a sense of urgency and a great fear of missing something. As a result the photographer is totally present, connected to the natural world. ‘Being there was one of the most intense peak experiences of my life.’

Awash with light and yet shadowed, cleaved and faceted, Pogorzaly’s landscapes and icebergs are imbued with a luminosity that is both seductive and unsettling. Here is a place of stoicism and dignity, great beauty and terrible menace.

Humour is in evidence too. Who can fail to recognise the heroic pluck of the Viking ship setting forth undaunted towards warmer waters, hastening its own demise? Or the surrealism of one elegant hooved hind leg, smooth as marble jutting from an arid white landscape – it is a wind-carved Michelangelo.

History inhabits these images. A lone figure casts a shadow across a vast landscape. One cannot help but recall the heroic age explorers and the intense curiosity that separated so many of them from society, their families, and their lives. But this person is not a ghostly apparition. He/she is returning our gaze. Here is a scientist conducting research. Here is an intrepid tourist posing for a remarkable photo.

Our desire to seek company or find meaning in these enigmatic icescapes is perhaps a natural response to an environment whose hostile weather conditions and sub-zero temperatures threaten our very existence. Amid all that is pure and white in Pogorzaly’s images, there are the oily dark waters and pitch-black skies that remind us that Antarctica and the Arctic are deadly places.

Of course, the polar regions are under threat from us too, with human induced climate change, mass tourism, and the perils posed by oil and gas exploitation bringing impacts that are too complex to fully appreciate. Biodiversity and the pristine beauty of the environment will both suffer. In sharing her work Pogorzaly encourages us to value, to protect and to admire the planet’s most remote and fragile regions, but mostly to hold space for a moment in time.

Marzena Pogorzaly’s work will be on display at Ice House Gallery, Holland Park, London from 30th July until 7th August, as part of a group show on the theme of NATURE.