Facing the Cold, Hard Truth
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 23, 2007; Page WE48
For a show about global warming, the photos in "Life at the Edge: The Big Thaw" are mighty chilly.
In fact, I almost didn't stay for photographer Paul Nicklen's remarks at the recent media walk-through. For one thing, Nicklen's pictures of polar ice and wildlife, while pretty -- heck, some of them will knock your thermal socks off -- seemed a tad familiar.
They should. Several were featured in the June issue of National Geographic magazine, which organized the show with the Meridian International Center. According to Nancy Matthews, director of the center's exhibition program, that issue, featuring photos by Nicklen and James Balog, was the most-read issue so far this year. But leopard seals, penguins and polar bears, oh my! Haven't we all seen this before?
Nicklen, a polar bear biologist turned photographer, would say yes -- and that's precisely the point. Arguing that it's less about what you see when you look at his work than when you don't, Nicklen implicitly asks us to close our eyes and imagine a world without ice. Now open them again. This is what's at stake: shrimplike amphipods and the cod that eat them. And the bowhead whales that eat the cod. And so on and so forth. The message here is subtle, but clear: We're all connected. Nobody swims alone.
Nicklen turned to the camera in frustration with science. In his view, he and his fellow biologists have failed to make the case that our planet is in trouble. But Nicklen's images tell only half the story. Like all documentary photographs, they can show only what's there, not what was or what will be. (For that, you need someone like Balog. Included in the show are two of his dramatic before-and-after shots, showing the 200-foot retreat of an Icelandic glacier over one six-month melting season last year.) There is just enough science here -- graphs and maps -- to buttress the show's argument.
In the end, this collection of 50 of Nicklen's pictures, boiled down from about 100,000 he shot for the magazine in three assignments at the Arctic Ocean and in Antarctica, is aptly titled. Not so much the thaw part. By themselves, the images in the show are cold (and mute) enough to give aid and comfort to any climate-change skeptic. But the part about the edge is dead right, and it's in that space that the work draws its silent power.
There's a word in art-speak for it: liminality, meaning a threshold state. Most of us will never visit the exotic worlds above and below the ice that Nicklen documents in his photos, but we can understand the implicit rebuke of his showing them to us. Enjoy it while you can, they seem to say, because all this frozen beauty might disappear one day, leaving nothing but pictures.
