Antarctic Research

Kniesche Collection 1920s-1970s and n.d. PP79 at the Maryland Historical Society

Box 8: Photoprints from glass negatives

Hiroshi Sugimoto

http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/LighteningField1.html

Anne Noble 

Most people never visit Antarctica – it is a landscape that exists in the imagination, shaped by photographs and other re-presentations in Antarctic Centres around the world. Noble began to investigate this general experience of Antarctica while waiting to depart for the ice in January 2002. To fill in time, she visited the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch and started to photograph what she could find of Antarctica in Christchurch, thus beginning the project that has taken her as far afield as Scandinavia and Japan. In these locations remote from Antarctica itself, snowstorms, icebergs, wildlife and the Antarctica light are recreated to offer a simulated experience of the great southern continent. Noble photographs these simulations and people’s experience of them. 

{Antarctica: from place to place} is a global photographic project which examines the way photography operates to shape and inform our knowledge of place. Ideas about the way photographic images mediate our experiences of the ‘real’ are presented in all their contemporary complexity. 

She returned in March 2005, on a Chilean cruise ship, to photograph tourist sites and the Antarctic tourism experience and then again in late 2008. 

->{“My starting point was to consider how Antarctica has been photographed. As early photographers often accompanied expeditions of explorers, adventurers and scientists, it is not surprising that they depicted Antarctica as heroic, sublime and picturesque, as a grand and vast place. Scale is crucial in these images. Sleds are dwarfed by giant wondrous icebergs, just as, in records of other global photo-expeditions, mules were dwarfed by the pyramids of Egypt. 

My photographs of museum interiors are made intending to capture the aura presented in the reproduction of Antarctica. I am interested in the context of their creation as well as the experience offered. Photographs of sets and scenes incorporate the light sources within the image as a repeated motif. I am interested in the subjective transcendent experience that some landscape images offer… These images of ‘dreams of place’ suggest a tougher project that might contribute to discussions about the connection of photography and Antarctic tourism to the colonisation of Antarctica and even photography as a colonising force.”}<-

Anne Noble is one of New Zealand’s most widely recognised and respected contemporary photographers. With images renowned for their beauty, complexity and the conceptual rigour, Noble has been described as “one of New Zealand photography’s most subtle and poetic of practitioners” and her work as “strangely arresting and almost always profoundly moving”. Professor of Fine Arts (Photography) at Massey University Wellington, she was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography in 2003.

Noble’s substantial body of work spans landscape, documentary and installations incorporating both still and moving images. She often works in series, enabling her to explore the medium and its possibilities in great depth. Since 2001, she has been researching and photographing Antarctica. In a project that has taken her to Antarctic centres all over the world as well as Antarctica itself, she explores the cultural construction of place and how our knowledge of such places is shaped through representation and imagination. Her images challenge the traditional depiction of the Antarctic landscape as heroic, picturesque or sublime and seek to suggest some of the current complexities that that underly the region’s beauty. In 2008 she won a prestigious US National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Award to travel and work in Antarctica to complete this project. There were 97 applicants for six awards and she was the only recipient from outside the US. 

Another substantial series, Ruby’s Room developed between 1998 and 2006, has attracted considerable international attention for its highly original depicition of childhood. Conceived as an alternative archeology of childhood, Noble, in association with her daughter, documented some of the many things children do with their mouths while eating and playing. This series was selected by the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris as the keynote contemporary photography exhibition for the inaugural Paris PhotoQuai Biennale of Photography in 2007.

Noble has been at the forefront of photographic practice in New Zealand since first attracting attention in the early 1980s with her acclaimed photographs of the Wanganui River. In 2001 she was honoured with a retrospective exhibition and a major book about her work spanning 20 years. Initiated by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the exhibition toured from 2001 - 2003.

Other exhibiton highlights include: Ice Blink: Antarctic Photographs, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2008; Antarctica: Joyce Campbell, Anne Noble, Connie Samaras, Pitzer Galleries Claremont College, Los Angeles 2007, Reveries: Photography and Mortality, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2007;ICONICA: The connection between contemporary art and reality, Patio Herreriano, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Valladolid, Spain, 2006; In Cold Light, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2005; Anne Noble: Ruby’s Room, Speilhaus Morrison Gallery, Berlin, 2005; Critic’s Choice, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2005; High Chair: New Zealand Artists on Childhood, St Paul St, Auckland, 2005; The Line Between Us, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2004, Slow Release: Recent photography from New Zealand at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2002; Observed and Contrived: Recent International Photography at the Queensland Art Gallery 1998 and the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane,1993.