Blankness in the Antarctic Landscape of An-My Lê

“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.

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.¹ 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.

1. See Amy Kaplan, “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal. 2.2 (2004): 153Ð9. [↩]