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.1
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.2
- 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. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
