Photography on Ice

Abstract

Given the ongoing economic and environmental upheaval, US 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 US Arctic might well have been written in the summer of 2011, as the ice of the North Pole melted to create a new, open zone of imperial contestation. Or it might be written in the near future, to decry new zones of economic development that restructure the Antarctic for exploitation. Although protected from economic mining interests by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty for the present, Antarctica has nevertheless become a focus of economic pressure driven by a renewed scramble for scarce resources.¹

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 shelfof Antarctica.

Eliot Porter, Antarctica 1978