As world reserves of oil and gas go on shrinking, and as the richest mineral deposits approach exhaustion, international consortia will begin to exert pressure on governments to permit exploratory drilling in the unglaciated dry valleys . . . and on the continental shelf of Antarctica . . .. The machinery, the supportive establishments, and the roads that will be necessary for conducting intensive, year-round exploration for oil cannot but produce a devastation at least equal to that which the consortium of petroleum corporations at Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast of Alaska have been responsible. (Eliot Porter, Antarctica, 1978)

U.S. Conservation activist and landscape photographer Eliot Porter's concern 30 years ago over the possibility of pressure from a "consortium of petroleum corporations" to drill in the fragile U.S. Arctic might well have been written in the summer of 2008, as the ice of the North Pole melted to create a new, open zone of imperial contestation. The Antarctic, though protected for the present from economic mining interests by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty Secretariat (ATS), has nevertheless become a focus of economic pressure driven by a renewed scramble for scarce resources.[1]

Figure 1 Eliot Porter, The Crater and Lava, Deception Island, Antarctica, January 19, 1975, Dye imbibition print (Kodak dye transfer), (c) 1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Bequest of the artist, P1990.51.478.2.

Yet the photographs comprising Antarctica (1978) depict a "timeless" and composed Antarctic landscape, betraying no sign of the human intervention that nevertheless motivates and frames the album. Porter, a celebrated nature photographer, was the first to bring to U.S. public attention a place very little known. Much wider and deeper public cultures of Antarctica developed in Britain, where the race to the south pole at the turn of the 20th Century reflected directly on imperial history, and in southern hemispheric colonial and commonwealth countries like New Zealand and Australia, where relation to the British crown still shapes national self-understanding. "Deception Island" serves as the cover for Antarctica, emphasizing the relative familiarity of its greenish, grass-like lichen and varied rock forms, and clearly echoing the strategies of Porter's earlier landscapes in the American west.

Porter helped create the Sierra Club aesthetic, which was also a complex strategy of promoting conservation in the U.S. post-War era.[2] Advocates sought to curb development in Yellowstone Park, but advocacy required promotion. The photographic school that developed to capture and control the image of the western landscape created dramatic and anachronistic images of seemingly untouched nature. Tourism, unleashed as a force to save the park, also created a pressure to industrialize and pave roads through the newly-desired wilderness: a paradox of eco-tourism now continued in relation to Antarctica.[3] Following the lead of the Sierra Club to use aesthetics as a strategy to promote conservation, Porter aimed to preserve the Antarctic wilderness against the inevitability of capitalist development through the power of his lush, full color coffee table book. But bringing the little known, non-nationalized Antarctic to a U.S. audience as wilderness, and as a handsome album of carefully framed photographs, also heavily marked the Antarctic as an object of U.S. national concern, and possibly of ownership. This tension between the documentary features of photography and its instrumentality to ownership, both private and national, continues to generate visual meaning in Antarctica.

Photography in the Antarctic has, since the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration (1895-1917), been the most overexposed of visual technologies. The mediation of photography brought into view a territory that had previously been represented only in written narrative and paintings and sketches that did not circulate as widely as photographs. Yet for all its popularizing, and indeed because the medium of photography became so ubiquitous and powerful, its significance in the creation of Antarctica as a place is often taken for granted. As documentary proof of national territorial claims, knowledge-gathering and mapping, and as advertising/promotion, and even as an aesthetic practice in itself, photography has played multiple roles in the creation of Antarctic place even before 1911-12, when both Norwegian and British explorers photographed their arrivals at the South Pole.[4] In this essay I build on the centrality of Antarctic photography to the creation of Antarctic place in order to make a claim about how a particular U.S. landscape aesthetic has emerged within and through the contemporary era's breakdown of national borders and of awareness of environmental crisis.

The 2008 series Events Ashore by U.S. photographer An-My Lê exemplifies this post-national, post-ecological view of the Antarctic. Working within and against the powerful imperial notion of Antarctica as a tabula rasa and the landscape tradition that nurtured Antarctica's blankness, Lê presents Antarctica as a "non-place," questioning assumptions about the impact and future of national presence on the continent.

Whiteout: An Inviting Blankness?

But before examining Lê's Events Ashore, I need to expose further the history of Antarctic landscape photography in the work of Porter and Herbert G. Ponting (1871-1935), the celebrated British photographer of the Heroic Age whose influence and example extends to both Porter and to Lê. Ponting came to Antarctica an experienced and well-traveled photographer of places far from the U.S., where he lived, or Britain, where he worked. But the Antarctic presented specific challenges due to its temperatures, harsh weather, monotones, and lack of more traditional flora and fauna. Ponting's well-earned reputation for photographing remote and little-seen places was based on a traditional landscape aesthetic that in many ways unraveled in Antarctica.[5]

Figure 2 Herbert Ponting, The Castle Berg, 1911

Ponting, the official "camera artist" of the 1910-12 Scott Expedition, struggled to address the relative lack of classical perspective of horizon and scale. Initially disappointed at not being among those chosen for the final trek to plant the British flag at the South Pole, he admitted that there would have been nothing of interest on the polar plateau to photograph, in any case. Thus, Ponting chose sites and objects close to the shore, the hut, and to human activity—framing strategies that created variations on classical perspective, with an icy particularity. Ponting helped establish what is now recognized as the aesthetic of the Heroic Age, characterized by dramatic juxtapositions either between human figures (or those of the built environment) and icescapes, or within inherently dynamic mountains or crevasses. The human-scale figures and the "sublime" icescapes only become meaningful in relation to one another. Without human figures, the unfamiliar environment would escape the particularity of place. This paradox of encounter, which fueled the Heroic Age, between an indifferent ice and humans intent on colonizing the uninhabitable, recurs throughout Antarctic photographic representation. It has left deep traces of style, object choice, and perspective on Antarctic representational history, not the least of which is the powerful imperial imaginary of Antarctica as a tabula rasa, or a pristine, untouched, terrain that, as the translation "blank slate" would suggest, invited marking. The kind of blankness produced by juxtaposing human figures on the ice or staging perspective with the lens is a "filled in" kind of blankness. It is not unlike the blankness of early European maps that designated the southern continent as terra incognita, in words written boldly across the map vellum. The declaration and naming of the territory as "unknown" was paradoxically a form of filling it in, and of knowing it.

But the type of blankness projected onto or produced through a visual engagement with Antarctica's terrain changes depending on who produces the image. For Ponting, the inviting blankness of Antarctica seemed almost formalist, an aesthetic challenge to create a recognizable scape from such impoverished materials. That his photos were part of an imperial expedition to claim Antarctica and the South Pole underscores the role of cultural concepts in the construction of empire. Ponting's landscapes were more than attempts to fill in the blank of Antarctica with familiar gestures to romantic sublimity: they were claims on the territory created by the camera's eye as much as by the juridical intentions of the British.

Porter, like Ponting, is a national photographer. But the U.S. played no role in the Heroic Age in Antarctica, and has never lodged an official claim to Antarctic territory, despite later substantial military involvement beginning with R. E. Byrd's 1929 flight over the South Pole and his establishment of "Little America" in 1932, a Navy base on the ice of the Ross Sea, and the subsequent greater efforts of "Operation Highjump" (1948) and "Operation Deepfreeze" (1956). So Porter's extension to Antarctica of a monumentalized "desert" blankness directly related to the Yosemite Sierra Club images as an object of conservation, rather than empire, marked a very different kind of "filling in" of the blank of Antarctica. "Deception Island" depicts a desert to be conserved, to be kept empty and devoid, paradoxically filled with its own desertedness. But in Antarctica Porter had to choose his landscapes carefully. Sites such as the Dry Valleys that comprised the 2% of unglaciated Antarctica, and the more conventionally dramatic mountains ranges and shores, leant themselves more directly to the kind of images associated with a sublime nature worth conserving.

Porter was flown to various locations as a guest of the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers Program (AAWP), keeping extensive notes on the places he visited, including the South Pole. Yet Porter chose not to include photographs at the South Pole in the book, thereby revealing his investments: the South Pole is a place where within the Porter aesthetic there would be nothing to see but significant evidence of U.S. colonization in the elaborate, if isolated, built environment. The South Pole Porter arrived at in 1978 could hardly be considered "empty." It featured a geodesic dome full of supplies and meat-locker-like dwellings for personnel. A bright red 'milk carton' observatory on stilts, other smaller buildings, a groomed runway, a striped ceremonial pole marker and various and sundry sheds, tents, and areas for vehicles and supplies constituted the scattered settlement. Unable to aestheticize these bare marks of colonization, Porter's conservation ethic in Antarctica leaves visually blank the pages where the South Pole Station or the polar plateau might have stood: it was the wrong kind of blank, an unserviceable lack of visual drama and significance best left to words and traditional narrative. In 1978 Porter empties the Antarctic of all national competition and any trace of the Heroic Age, using aerial and remote technologies of viewing. Porter also blanks out Antarctica's imperial history, and so performs a new form of imperialism more suited to the U.S. non-claimancy stance.

Another type of serviceable blanking of Antarctic space occurs in the discourse of international science, which, since the ATS has guided and limited access to and activities on the continent, is the justification for the human presence at the South Pole. Writers often celebrate Antarctica as the "frozen laboratory" for science. A laboratory is a place, an occasion really, that provides the means by which science is done. While a lab may have some characteristics of its own—orderliness, for one—it lacks traits outside those that can be filled by experimentation. The trope of the frozen laboratory suggests an Antarctica that is a neutral, clean, and untouched space for the work of science, itself free of ideological investments or products. Other common descriptors of Antarctica as "remote" or "desolate" also enforce a serviceable blankness on a territory that increasingly finds itself on the receiving end of unprecedented—and ever-increasing—concentrations of human interest.[6]

"Post-Heroic" Age Photography

Contemporary photographers, including professionals, tourists, and workers, engage Antarctica fully aware of its short visual history. Ponting's black and white juxtapositions of ice and human figures created a powerful aesthetic characterized by the trace of the body: the footprint, the track in ice, and the human figure itself. The Heroic aesthetic sees men, ice, materials, and animals all within a range of objects and relations that coordinate towards an inhabitation, a claim. Despite and against their own fragility or marginality to the ice, these marks march toward a future of increased levels of habitation: more marks and more men. Yet the present produced by these marks of culture on the ice can never attain the "aura" of first arrivals (questionably) documented by Heroic Age photographers. The illusory nearness of the original heroic achievements—due in part to the "thinness" of Antarctic human history that, as a result, over-emphasizes the heroic deeds; the ability of ice to preserve for many years the marks of human activity; and the overwhelming durability and iconicity of the barely colonized ice itself—has resulted in a pervasive fascination and even nostalgia for a former heroic landscape and narratives of explorers' hardship and suffering. Of course, contemporary observers cannot in reality approach the state of the original heroes. The post-Heroic in Antarctica is expressed through a critique laden with the desire for the past's traces.

The imaginary of an unmarked Antarctica and the post-Heroic reality of human inhabitation collide in An-My Lê's photographs taken at the South Pole. Lê's response to the history of blankness at the South Pole is to stare it down. Lê disrupts the aestheticization of Antarctic wilderness begun with the Heroic Age and instead links Antarctica to sites of U.S. militarization around the globe. Lê inherits an iconography from Ponting and applied to a U.S. western subject through Porter, but focuses not on the "empty" deserts of untouched wilderness, or the wilderness fantasy, but rather on the traces of human presence mystified in the Porter images. For Lê, the detritus of a built environment becomes the survival of the Heroic and later environmentally conscious ages that sit strangely, disturbingly on a contemporary Antarctic of international science.

Figure 3 An-My Lê
Fuel Storage Tanks, McMurdo Station, Antarctica, 2008
Archival pigment print
40 x 56 1/2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy Gallery

As plain and as chaotic and unfocused as the dispiriting sprawl it pictures, Fuel Storage McMurdo documents U.S. presence at the site of Scott's former base, a location that at first glance hardly seems Antarctic at all. What Lê has done to create this new perspective on Antarctica is to simply turn around. At McMurdo Station, instead of photographing the main station from the shore, Lê climbs Observation Hill (named by Scott's men and used, as the name implies, for orienting, it also is the site of a memorial cross to the dead of that expedition) only to point her lens at the back of the base for an image reminiscent of the less iconic images of the Heroic Age huts—the ones that showed the scattered boxes, equipment, and disorderliness of the attempt to inhabit the ice. At McMurdo or "Mac Town," this suburban-style sprawl has become institutionalized and inescapable, a mark no longer of temporariness or even excess, but of the very essence of U.S. presence in Antarctica. And it is not a pretty picture.

Lê connects and captures the edges and unnoticed perspectives and juxtapositions of non-places, or transit zones, such as aircraft carriers, "foreign" officer housing, or Antarctica—a place that notoriously lacks natives or traditional nation-states. Like Ponting, who came to Antarctica already having established a career as a photographer of the far-flung British empire, Lê comes to Antarctica from other global locations. Instead of treating the place, its conditions, and its culture as exceptional, she places Antarctica among her Events Ashore series, linking U.S. military outposts and bases around the world, including Japan, Australia, Kuwait, Iraq, and California.[7] Lê's vision of Antarctica as site in the global economy, emphasizes the posthuman, the corporate, and industrial features of contemporary Antarctica. Refusing the overexposed, official view, Lê shifts away from what we might call an Antarctic exceptionalism. Antarctic exceptionalism, modeled on American exceptionalism, creates a separate sphere for Antarctica. Antarctic exceptionalism abounds in nature channel canards: Antarctica has never known war; it lacks people and history; it lacks political turmoil. Yet Antarctica is no space of elemental nature, and is only obscured as a list of negatives, or blanks. Keeping Antarctica blank has its costs.

On the contrary, Lê asserts the links to capital flow in Fuel Storage McMurdo, seeming to have anticipated the headlines about the price of oil. The increased volatility of oil prices has negatively affected planning and funding of the very NSF program that sent Lê, in 2008, to photograph these barrels of oil, which, in the present climate, represent a completely fossil fuel-reliant economy.[8] Oil barrels, full and stored or empty and abandoned, have, since the 1930s when a concerted U.S. effort to colonize Antarctica began, been a stock image of Antarctic stations.[9] Where a clearing of tree stumps once marked the passing of wilderness, the fuel storage tanks tell similar tales of the technology and resource needs for human being. The massive effort to create permanent structures in a wilderness is nowhere more dramatic than at the South Pole, where nothing survives but ice, and everything, from toothpicks to neutron detectors, must be flown in from the north at great effort and cost.

Figure 4 An-My Lê
Abandoned Dome, South Pole, Antarctica, 2008
Archival pigment print
40 x 56 1/2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy Gallery

The built environment at the South Pole, though relatively circumscribed and brief in duration, is nevertheless deeply marked by U.S. cultural projections. How many people know that a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, or a "Bucky Ball," is slowly being buried in the ice of the south pole, after having been planned in the late 1960s and completed in 1973 and shielding inhabitants and supplies until 2007? Lê's image of the sunken dome that once carried Fuller's utopian vision of "spaceship earth," is reminiscent of Tacita Dean's "Fernsehturm" series on modernist architecture. Sue Hubbard describes this series as "encapsulat[ing] a lost historic vision and an optimistic belief in a now defunct social system."[10] Marks of everyday inhabitation such as flags and footprints and bright tape take on an almost macabre feel in the merciless frame: this is a ruin of a futuristic ideal, now obsolete and trapped in ice. The "deadpan" framing places the dome and viewer on the same plane, emphasizing the harsh juxtaposition of human and built environment. Lê's photography of the built environment at the South Pole emphasizes the obsolete, the Fordist prehistory of heavy machinery and the footprint of what I will call the "U.S. Heroic Age" of Naval operations beginning in 1929 and ending with the development of the International Polar Year and the ATS in 1959. While the U.S. brokered the ATS and its international safekeeping of the territory from claims, the period of the U.S. Heroic Age nevertheless resulted in the U.S. effectively and solely colonizing the Pole by building the first permanent station in the 1950s, then the Bucky dome in the 1960s, and now the third generation of super-sleek corporate-style station, completed in 2008 and almost ostentatiously omitted by Lê.

Instead of the new station, Lê investigates the failed and inaccessible, incomplete, or buried traces of the built environment. She works against the coffee table book aesthetic; her images are enormous, not meant for containment between covers, no matter how glossy. Her high art and highly technical images negotiate between the landscape aesthetic that broke down at the Pole and the more vernacular aesthetic that visitors to, and inhabitants of, the South Pole have been attempting to reestablish. The photography of Emil Schulthess, with its use of fish-eye lenses to reflect in the mirror ball of the ceremonial south pole and its emphasis on sun dogs and other unusual weather phenomenon, is a form of updated "ponting" (after Ponting's carefully—and to Scott's men intrusively—staged perspectives).[11] The extremophile exceptionalism has through repetition and circulation (particularly on the internet) become an ironic if normalizing repertoire of representations of the polar plateau.[12] Lê focuses instead on the industrial infrastructure, the chaotic, menacing, and wasted space of an unredeemable blankness very different from both the blank of imperialism's hope and the desert of Porter's conservation aesthetic.

Figure 5 An-My Lê
Storage Berms, South Pole, Antarctica, 2008
Archival pigment print
40 x 56 1/2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy Gallery

More significant to Lê than the new station is the lost and discarded, the incoherent epiphenomenal and un-beautiful, as in Storage Berms at South Pole. Lê labels the photo using the argot of the U.S. base as it has derived from its Naval origins. The term "storage berm" refers to an earthwork or a mound formed as a result of human labor, as in the berm walls of a fortress or of mounded earth in a garden. But the South Pole is neither fortress nor garden; and the term berm can help to understand how culture in the form of language and built environment is being reshaped in Antarctica. "The berms" in 'Polie' patois refers to the entire storage area on the near perimeter of the central encampment consisting of the Dome, new pole station, and out buildings. An extensive sprawl of plywood platform covered with all sorts of off-loaded cargo forms an almost city-like network of streets. The berm area is like a warehouse without sides or a roof. The bermed platforms require an intensive regime of shoveling to retain their integrity. Far from the "city center" of science or logistics, the berms are the domain of mostly the lesser skilled workers, who are assigned their maintenance. It is on this shunted yet essential sprawl that Lê chooses to center her image, turning away from the central pole. If there can be a "backside" to a circumlocated pole, the berms are it.[13]

The image lacks contextualizing features beyond a rudimentary and conventional sectioning into sky, horizon line, and foreground of ice. Lê destabilizes this overbearing classical perspective by mixing elements of motion and stasis. Through the overlay of compositional features, Lê also questions the very usefulness of perspective, of relative motion, tracking, and lighting. Despite the bright sunshine and the classical composition, the viewer hardly knows where to focus within the enormous frame. The perspectivally broad, flat and multi-focused approach refutes the unipolar cliché and seems to be saying that there is more here in this basic land-sky polar plateau than is generally considered; the pole becomes in this way more like other sites on earth—and in history—than in the extremophile tradition.

Lê records a built environment that is brutally industrial, menacing, and strangely familiar. While her large format images monumentalize the effort to support scientists in Antarctica, it also points to the growing tension between human-powered modes of field work and remote, simulated, or robotic modes of information gathering and data production. The human body may not be as necessary to science as an attachment to heroic history might have it. The glorification of labor and the working class aspect of the South Pole site gestures complicatedly to the impossibility of nostalgia for the human body as the primary site for meaning on the ice—even as that body is now a worker in an organization within an infrastructure far removed from the dangers faced by the original heroes. Lê's South Pole is a combination (post)industrial office park and (de)militarized base. The support of science requires an infrastructure whose implications secure Antarctica within a map of globalization and capital flows at odds with depictions of the ice as pure, empty, or even as heroic and sublime.

Figure 6 An-My Lê
Offload, Two Marines California, 2006
Archival pigment print
40 x 56 1/2 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy Gallery

Military operations are captured by Lê in Offload, a similarly structured scene of sky meeting water taken from an elevated position. Though the location is a shore, not a frozen polar plateau, and the characters are a military amphibious vehicle, a tank, and an aircraft carrier headed towards the horizon, these elements are in analogous position to those in Storage Berms at the Pole. The Marines on the beach are anonymous, and dwarfed by the scene and machinery from which they emerged and which they drive. Relative movement comes through in the spume clouding the landing vehicle, which is caught between being in the water and sitting on shore. A vaguely malevolent, thick sky hangs over the affair. The shared composition of Offload and Storage Berms at Pole demonstrates Lê's anti-exceptionalist positioning of Antarctica as removed from its own narrow history of extremophile representation. Rather, Lê places Antarctica in a visually and politically homologous position to globalization of the U.S. military. As Chalmers Johnson has observed, the "U.S. has bases in every continent but Antarctica"—though Lê would suggest a minor correction: the Antarctic is not fully or cleanly demilitarized, even though the ATS remains in effect.[14] As Simon Jenkins recently argued in The Guardian, the U.S. and other nations adhere nominally to the ATS restrictions against drilling, assaying, and other development plans, to the extent that science programs can do whatever they want.[15] That includes, within science programs—which no one suggests are anything but serious and valuable—activities and implications that are also nationally strategic. These activities help to aggrandize development and may be refunctioned at a time when the empty frozen laboratory becomes a different kind of blank, when ice core drilling and blasting might be put to other less scientifically benign purposes.

The tiny human figures against a grand background echo Ponting's classic perspective. But in this take the human figures are diminished toy soldiers rather than anchors of the human. Lê amplifies the potential of Heroic Age sublime to an extreme distortion comments back on the limits of the very notion of the sublime to give any real proportion to nature or to humanity. This imbalance was immanent in Ponting. Lê, the contemporary Ponting, has forced us to look at the absurdity, the menace, the doom both in the material facts of humanity's trace in Antarctica, and also in the mode of looking at Antarctica.

Porter's anxious warning about drilling in the ice has returned in the form of concern over global warming and renewed resource pressure worldwide. And yet artists are less interested in the propaganda techniques of the earlier generations of eco-art.[16] A new style of the eco-visual is emerging in which artists directly survey the damage in the landscape, risking its aestheticization and their own complicity in ruin—yet avoiding the equally problematic evacuation of the human from the concept of wilderness.[17] Lê's complex "deadpan" exposure, or muted outrage, characterizes the post-Heroic in Antarctic photography as both desiring the Heroic and critiquing its trace, lamenting its tabula rasa clarities while refusing everything imperial that its blankness stands for.

Shocked Blank

The post-Heroic indexes, and is represented by, the marks in the photograph, the deep palimpsest-like tracks, which accrete and cover, and are defaced and erased in the ice. This blankness is a blanking as well. The dense and overlaid tracks repeat the mark of the footstep of the Heroic Age, the first arrivals, the lone witnesses to a romantic sublime landscape. The layering of tracks comments on habitation and the passing of human time—the mechanical industrial sublime replaces the former South Pole concept by effacing it.[18] The new Pole is both marked by and replaces the idea of an unmarkable, vast, timeless land. The marks in Storage Berms at the South Pole are trashed, illegible, untraceable to a singular, heroic agent. Rather, these tracks violently blank out Ponting's and Porter's blanking. This latest form of blanking provides the central argument of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.[19] In describing how free market economic policies, beginning after WWII, have exploited natural disasters to promote profit as well as policy change to insure future profits, Klein describes a blankness that is unlike the 19th Century imperial blankness of the map, whose white spaces were created only to be filled in.

Klein's first chapter, "Blank is Beautiful," describes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as an example of the way a natural disaster became an opportunity to politically remake the city to benefit capital, but not necessarily the displaced inhabitants. Klein agues that disaster capitalism not only exploits natural disaster, but produces disaster—through the techniques of shock therapy on the level of individuals, and through the kind of defense policies of "shock and awe" at the center of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Shock and awe was designed to radically undo Iraqi society so that occupying forces might rebuild on terms favorable to their interests. While the blankness in Storage Berms at the South Pole is not reducible to the evacuating violence that Klein analyzes, a violent process of marking and overwriting is nevertheless at play in the composition and subject of Lê's photograph. This new kind of footprint is unlike the original Heroic Age man-hauled and dog-sledded tracks that indexed singular, if nationalist effort and human-animal time frames and scales. It is, rather, a demonstration for a disembodied, many-limbed, and non-teleological global capital. The South Pole is in many ways a perfect, endless arrival point for a global capital flow, whose very maintenance of the new South Pole requires more attention than any past arrival or claim. The South Pole becomes claimable—beyond the limits of biology or the ecosystem, and beyond the restraints of any treaty limiting national or corporate profit—only within this new economy of extreme capitalism. The contemporary South Pole is a ready-made desert for "shock doctrine" economics.

Working within globalizing capital and big science in Antarctica is a small but persistent history within the U.S., the NSF: the Artists and Writers Program. Beginning as early as 1957, it has sent visual, sound, literary, and other artists-observers to the ice, including both Porter and Lê.[20] Under the aegis and even encouragement of the NSF, we now have an incredible record, both descriptive and critical, of human presence in the Antarctic that would never have been possible if not for this underfunded program. Yet paradoxes similar to those of the Sierra Club's promotion/ conservancy of Yosemite emerge: national interest in a non-national project, promotion at the cost of the pristine, obeisance to the state as a factor in its critique. The AAWP has managed beautifully to balance the requirements of the state and the need to support science with an allowance for artistic freedom. Although the populations of the southern hemispheric states like Australia and New Zealand incorporate Antarctica much more intimately into their national cultures, the size and quality of the U.S. program has produced a U.S.-authored commentary disproportionate to U.S. cultural involvement in Antarctica. We could even argue that the program keeps the U.S. in the game culturally, and in the important area of geopolitics and the media, or that the AAWP is the cultural wing of a neoimperial project in Antarctica, one that operates beyond the need to legally claim territory, and that surpasses the sundry claims of other nations no matter their histories and worthiness. The cultural imperialism of the U.S. is promoted, expressed, and yet also countermanded by the NSF AAWP. No matter what kind of art is produced—children's books or high art depicting U.S. militarism—the state cannot fail to benefit.

But where do the future of consortia enter? Can the arts create a bulwark against capital, even as the arts are a form of capital? We're back to the Sierra Club perplexity: does looking at any ideological filling-in of a blank national consciousness of Antarctica lead to freedom for development? Lê's post-Heroic, post-ecological wasteland at the South Pole suggests another role for the constructed tabula rasa: that blanking the object may help preserve it from being filled in. Knowing as we do the constructedness of every approach to the radical place of Antarctica, can we imagine a politics of unmaking Antarctica that would create a blankness not to be filled, but to be left unserviceable and de-instrumentalized? For such a vision we may have to stare into Lê's overexposed, layered track marks before they too melt into air.

Endnotes

1. See the Introduction to this special issue for details of the 2008 claims in the Arctic and Antarctic. Though Porter's Antarctic landscapes preceded the 1993 anti-mining agreement under the ATS, pressure to extract value from increasingly scarce territorial resource has only increased since 1978. Eliot Porter, Antarctica. New York: Dutton, 1978. [Return to text]

2. For a description of the Sierra Club aesthetic, see: Deborah Bright, "The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics." Art Journal 5.2 (1992): 60-71. For a fuller background on Porter's nature ideology, see: Finis Dunaway, "On the Subtle Spectacle of Fallen Leaves." Environmental History. 9.4 (2004). Refer to page 730 of that text for how,"Porter chose to frame the environment as untouched and unspoiled, as a space that lies outside the fell clutch of humanity." Also see the the special issue of Aperture, "Beyond Wilderness," Volume 120 (1990), for a "critique of representational practices of major conservation organizations such as The Sierra Club . . . and their . . . 'pinup' photography . . .." [Return to text]

3. For example, Robert Powell, "Antarctic Tourists: Ambassadors or Consumers?" Polar Record. 44 (2008): 233-41. [Return to text]

4. The widely reproduced Scott photos and the much less well known Amundsen photos depict haggard men in thick gear amid a scene of almost total whiteout. Their usefulness as evidence has been obviated by their ancillary nature. See: Christy Collis, "Australia's Antarctic Turf." Journal of Media Culture. 7.4 (2004). Here Collis discusses Mawson's use of photography as part of a claiming repertoire. Cameras came to Antarctic waters in 1895. Scott had cameras along on the 1905 expedition, as did Shackleton on his 1907 attempt to reach the pole. But no official photographer predates Ponting. [Return to text]

5. Antarctica's challenge to human perception is discussed in William Fox, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent. San Antonio: Trinity Press, 2006. For a valuable art historical and theoretical discussion of blankness see the chapter on "Blankness as a Signifier" in: Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. London: Allworth Press, 2000. [Return to text]

6. Whiteout, or the loss of orienting or identifying features in the atmosphere is a common polar occurrence as well as a mode of blanking I do not discuss in this essay. For a brief discussion of whiteout in Antarctic photography see: E. Glasberg, "Camera Artists in Antarctica." New Zealand Journal of Photography. 65 (2007): 21-3. [Return to text]

7. See Amy Kaplan, "The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism." Comparative American Studies: An International Journal. 2.2 (2004): 153Ð9. [Return to text]

8. See the Introduction to this special issue for the way rising oil prices have increased pressure to exploit the polar regions as possible solutions. [Return to text]

9. Photographs of U.S. explorer Richard E. Byrd's "Little America" bases from 1928-1938 document a built environment prominently featuring jumbled boxes and fuel cans on a field of ice. For a range of photographs depicting U.S. bases throughout the 1930s and 1940s see "All-out Assault on Antarctica," National Geographic Magazine. CX.2 (1956): 141-180. Explicitly modeled after the Little America base, the opening shots of the Antarctic base in John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing pans across empty fuel drums against the ice. [Return to text]

10. See Sue Hubbard's review of Tacita Dean at the Tate. A filmic/cultural icon of a "defunct social system" is the scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) depicting the Statue of Liberty as a beached ruin. [Return to text]

11. Stephen Pyne, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986, p. 205. Pyne offers a portfolio of Antarctic representation including Ponting, Porter, and Schulthess. [Return to text]

12. The term refers to love of extremes as well as to a class of creatures that has evolved to thrive in desert conditions such as those prevailing in Antarctica. [Return to text]

13. In a scene from her 1981 short story "Sur," Ursula Le Guin describes her characters encountering the area around Scott's abandoned hut. Looking much different than the famous Ponting shots, the hut area is a mass of dog turds and open spilt containers, sealskins and bloody guts. The narrator remarks: "The backside of Heroism is often sad; women and servants know that." [Return to text]

14. Chalmers Johnson, "America's Empire of Bases." Tomdispatch.com, January 2008. [Return to text]

15. Simon Jenkins, "Scientists and Soldiers Can No Longer Keep These Paradises to Themselves." The Guardian. 14 March 2008. [Return to text]

16. "After Nature" exhibit at The New Museum, New York City, July-October 2008, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. [Return to text]

17. William Cronin, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature." Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995: 69-90. [Return to text]

18. Alix Ohlin, "Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime." Art Journal. 61.4 (2002): 22-35. [Return to text]

19. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007. [Return to text]

20. I too was a guest of the program in 2004-5. Other contributors to the special issue supported by the AAWP include: Connie Samaras, Ann Aghion, Andrea Polli, and Anne Noble [Return to text]