America Dreams

The notion of the heroic is also complicated. There are, of course, those laboring under the weight of their own egos and conventional ideas of masculinity. But, especially among the support staff, there are many others, both women and men, to whom one can trust one’s life, people who see survival as a matter of interdependency and heroic actions as a potential necessity, not a Romantic narrative of winners, losers and an audience of hero worshippers.

The feminist gesture behind my photographs is not always overtly evident in the initial reading of the images. This is especially so as here I avoided photographing figures because it is often easier to read architectural narratives without picturing inhabitants. For some time now, regardless of subject matter, I’ve been interested in the idea of positionality, one case in point being the shifting constructions and circumstances of the body behind the camera. In one prior project on U.S. urban landscape (Angelic States—Event Sequence, 1998-2003), almost all the places I photographed were off limits to cameras. I dealt with this by playing into the gendered assumptions surrounding the person people thought they were seeing behind the camera. For example, when guards approached me for photographing inside a casino, I took on the persona of a timid housewife whose husband had assured her that photography was allowed (see Figure 11). In Antarctica, in my position as “the photographer,” I anticipated that how some would perceive me would be dependent on whatever technology I was seen using. For example, although many were respectful of the fact that I knew what I was doing, when I began to work first with the smaller cameras I brought, a number of “polies” offered unsolicited opinions as to how I was using the wrong lens or the incorrect camera body. Part of it might have had to do with the fact that despite being queer and white, I was still the wrong silhouette and shade (short, olive, and curvy) for the explorer’s body and the polar gear issued to me. I may have looked more like Kenny on South Park than Ernest Shackleton, but when I brought out the 4×5 camera and black focusing cloth, thus “borrowing” the mantle of Robert Scott’s official photographer George Herbert Ponting, it was only then that the unwanted suggestions stopped.

Aside, however, from how the body is enacted while taking pictures, I also made a decidedly feminist edit when taking photographs of the then two libraries: the one that was soon to be dismantled in the Dome and the other that was being newly assembled in the Amundsen-Scott building. A comparison of the libraries reveals the differing cultural histories of the structures. The Dome’s collection was a diverse range of books from pulp to experimental fiction, from western classics to political theory. At the time I was there, the new library was not as eclectic and, in stark contrast, had Christian religious texts peppering the shelves no matter what the category. However, the embedded focal point of my images was how contemporary women authors had been mis-categorized in both collections. In the Dome library, shelved under the “Romance” section was Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity while in the new station Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions had been placed under “Wildlife/Nature” (see Figure 12 and Figure 13).

There is a sort of intractable neutrality when it comes to discussing and imagining Antarctica. A few scholars, like Bloom, have rigorously grappled with the erasures, untruths, origins, and functions of such a perception. But I was puzzled by my own experience of it while there, as though I was a metal particle being drawn to a magnetic field. Part of it I could attribute to the relentless culture of rationality in scientific enclaves. However, because I was interested in the unconscious architectural messages—Why space operates as the source of SF inspiration? Why not the heterotopias of Samuel Delaney, the critiques of scientific investigation of Stansilaw Lem, the near futures of Octavia Butler where change is the only constant, or the gender twists of James Tiptree Jr.?—I didn’t feel that my immersion in a culture of objectivity fully explained this pull. In retrospect, part of it has to do with the fact that any political questions including gender are endlessly open ones, subject to historical and cultural flux.