Tristan Duke: Glacial Optics

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Using camera lenses made of Arctic ice, Tristan Duke's ongoing, experimental photographic project, Glacial Optics, explores our current moment of climate crisis.

In the spring of 2022, artist Tristan Duke set sail for the Arctic Island of Svalbard, the fastest-warming place on the planet. His goal was to craft functioning camera lenses from the very ice of the glaciers. Through melting ice lenses, Duke captured portraits of an Arctic landscape in quiet turmoil. These ephemeral lenses became the foundation for a photographic series imagining the "gaze of the glacier" as a means of confronting the global climate emergency.

On returning from the Arctic, Duke turned his ice-lens camera to document massive wildfires raging across the American West — bringing the melting glaciers to bear witness to the smoke and fire of the Anthropocene.

Next, Duke traveled the US, visiting labs where scientists study glacier ice for clues to better predict our climate future. By laying ice core samples directly on large sheets of photo paper, Duke created photograms, distilling the concept of the ice lens into formal studies of light moving through ice.

Glacial Optics includes essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Brandee Caoba, with a foreword from Michael Govan, as well as the artist's field notes and original research chronicling the unlikely history of ice lenses.

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Using camera lenses made of Arctic ice, Tristan Duke's ongoing, experimental photographic project, Glacial Optics, explores our current moment of climate crisis.

In the spring of 2022, artist Tristan Duke set sail for the Arctic Island of Svalbard, the fastest-warming place on the planet. His goal was to craft functioning camera lenses from the very ice of the glaciers. Through melting ice lenses, Duke captured portraits of an Arctic landscape in quiet turmoil. These ephemeral lenses became the foundation for a photographic series imagining the "gaze of the glacier" as a means of confronting the global climate emergency.

On returning from the Arctic, Duke turned his ice-lens camera to document massive wildfires raging across the American West — bringing the melting glaciers to bear witness to the smoke and fire of the Anthropocene.

Next, Duke traveled the US, visiting labs where scientists study glacier ice for clues to better predict our climate future. By laying ice core samples directly on large sheets of photo paper, Duke created photograms, distilling the concept of the ice lens into formal studies of light moving through ice.

Glacial Optics includes essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Brandee Caoba, with a foreword from Michael Govan, as well as the artist's field notes and original research chronicling the unlikely history of ice lenses.

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  • Artwork by Tristan Duke
    Foreword by Michael Govan
    Texts by Brandee Caoba, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Lucy Lippard

    Hardcover with fold-out insert
    9 x 12.5 inches
    180 pages / 90 images

    Trade ISBN: 9798890181152
    Signed ISBN: 9798890181169

    This book is the first in a series made possible by a generous multi-year grant from Xin Liu and the Enlight Foundation. The initiative focuses on the work of artists contending with climate change, using their practices and processes to consider this ongoing and rapidly accelerating situation from new vantage points. We hope that Glacial Optics and future titles produced with this grant will also provide a gateway to further education and inspiration.

  • Tristan Duke (b. 1981) is an artist and experimental photographer whose work investigates perception, deep time, and environmental change. His practice is driven by a fascination with how we see and understand the world—both through the limits of human vision and the expanded possibilities offered by optical and scientific instruments. By building his own cameras, inventing new photographic processes, and engaging in material experimentation, Duke reimaginges the role of photography as a tool for art and inqiury. Duke has shared his work internationally, with exhibitions and lectures at institutions including the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Santa Fe Institute, SITE Santa Fe, Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), Rhode Island School of Design (Providence), C|O Berlin, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), and many others.