‘Making scientists become artists again:’ photographer Ian van Coller reimagines glacier retreat
GlacierHub recently sat down with renowned photographer Ian van Coller to discuss his new photography book, Kilimanjaro’s last glacier – reinterpretation of a past His project to summit a dormant Tanzania volcano to document its rapidly disappearing glaciers. In his new book, now in black and white, Van Koehler’s photography raises critical questions about the relationship between art and science, and asks about the toll that art and science have wrought. climate change Subtle and ethereal landscape footage through a glacier that exists on the largest freestanding mountain in the world.
On a zoom screen during our virtual conversation, Van Koehler holds his new book, which stretches from his shoulders to his hips. He flipped through the heavy, shiny pages until he stopped and turned the book around to face the screen.
“Yeah, this is probably my favorite,” he said, looking down at a black-and-white landscape photo of the eastern Kilimanjaro ice field. This photo is his, from a summit trip in 2016. “It reminds me of seeing Superman’s castle in the movies as a kid,” he told GlacierHub. “It’s architecture. It’s immortal.”
This photo of the eastern ice sheet appears in his new book, The Last Glacier of Mount Kilimanjaro, and is a favorite of Van Kohler’s collection.Courtesy of Ian Van Kohler
Originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, Van Kohler During his early career, he photographed political upheaval and cultural issues in the apartheid and post-apartheid era. When he moved to the United States in 1992 to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Arizona State University and then a Masters at the University of New Mexico, his art shifted to focus on environmental issues. His most recent work in front of a computer screen is a response to a book published in 2016 titled “Kilimanjaro: The Last Glacier. After hiking to the top of the mountain, he created the 2016 book page 50 inches tall Document what will soon be lost due to climate change.
Van Koehler’s work has been widely recognized and is held in major museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Getty Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of South Africa. Van Kohler spent three years as a member of a mountaineering team before exploring Kilimanjaro. last glacier Collective, documenting the disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana. There, he was joined by two printmakers, Todd Anderson and Bruce Crownover, who produced their own work. “We wanted to document a particular space in time from the perspective of three different artists,” said Van Koller, who currently lives in Bozeman, Montana, and is a photography professor at Montana State University.
In 2015, Van Kohler came across a photo of a Kilimanjaro glacier, which piqued his curiosity. “This castle-like layer of ice is just amazing,” Van Kohler said. “I’ve been to a lot of glaciers and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
Mount Kilimanjaro rises above the Tanzanian grasslands and is one of the three largest glacial regions on the African continent.It has also become a sign of climate change, lost 84% The loss of its ice cover since 1912 – a loss attributed to warmer temperatures and less frequent freezing snowy and cloudy days.
The photo found by Van Koehler was made by Douglas Hardy, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who studies the glaciers of Kilimanjaro. A few days after seeing the photo, Van Kohler contacted Hardy to ask if he would consider taking him on his next annual research trip to the summit. Within weeks, the pair had arranged a trip where Hardy would continue to study the effects of climate change on mountain ecosystems and Van Koehler would take a series of photos documenting the disappearing glaciers. The 2016 travels will continue to be a source of inspiration for van Coller.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GlacierHub: Take me to the top of Kilimanjaro. What was 2016 like?
Ian Van Kohler: It’s a hike, nothing technical at all. It’s a matter of stamina, strength, and the ability not to suffer from altitude sickness. I generally don’t like people taking my camera equipment, but we hired porters and they helped a lot.
We spent four nights and five days at the top of the mountain. We camp next to the northern ice sheet, the largest body of ice still there—about 50 feet thick. From there, I hike every day to other ice fields at the summit, where there are no moving glaciers. Unlike traditional glaciers that move down the slopes, Kilimanjaro’s glaciers simply sit on top of the mountain, dissipating in volcanic ash.
A photograph of a Kilimanjaro glacier, featured in Van Koller’s book The Last Glacier of Kilimanjaro. Courtesy of Ian Van Kohler.
GH: How did you prepare for this trip?
IVC: I do a lot of research before going somewhere, and I look at a lot of photos to get an idea of what I might encounter. I’m also often able to get some funding from the university, which requires me to write a grant and articulate what I intend to portray.
I have a long history of working in portraiture, and I am interested in colonial heritage. So during my 2016 trip, I was intrigued by the people who helped us get to the top and what their livelihoods would mean when the glacier disappeared. In my first book on the Kilimanjaro glaciers, I took formal portraits of these people and then paired them with formal portraits of the glacier. When I came back from a trip, I made a book that opened to 250″, 40 x 50″ pages. Portraits of porters are paired with those of the glacier as you flip through the color photos.
GH: In “The Last Glacier of Kilimanjaro,” your recent reinterpretation of this earlier book, you excluded formal portraits of local men, your photos were in black and white, and other variations. why is it like this?
IVC: Part of that can be explained by my heritage as a privileged white male, growing up in South Africa, and the power dynamics that come with the camera, which I feel is a vulnerable line. At this point in time, I don’t want to stray from the landscape I’m trying to focus on.
i made another recent books On a dry valley next to McMurdo, Antarctica. This book is the trajectory I walked through in 12 hours, and it takes the audience through the book as you and I walk through the landscape. In this new interpretation, I intend to do the same, traversing the Kilimanjaro landscape. I want this book to focus on the glacier itself.
Over the past few years I have been very interested in the idea of the sublime in the original Victorian concept. I was deeply influenced by Alexander von Humboldt and later Victorian writers, poets and artists, and the intersection between art and science. But over time, this has transformed into our contemporary Instagram culture of oversaturated photos of beautiful sunsets.
As a photographer and artist, I try to connect with nature and the earth. I can do this by representing the landscape in a detailed, subtle way. When I went back to this project, I had a lot of images that I didn’t use in the original book, and I reinterpreted them in a very dark, ominous, sublime way. That’s why I lean more towards black and white.
Van Koehler holds “The Last Glacier of Kilimanjaro”. The book opens to 26″x40″, printed and designed by Ian van Coller and bound by Drum Leaf and John DeMerritt.Courtesy of Ian Van Kohler
GH: What message do you want to convey through your photos?
IVC: I want to mainly evoke sympathy for the natural world. This is the main driver of everything I do now. I don’t have many positive views about our future as human beings, but I hope to document the changing landscape and document what we’ve lost. We have these places, they are changing, and they are beautiful. So I wanted to show how beautiful they are, why we should care about them, and why we should save what we have.
GH: Art as a form of climate action is a growing field. Do you think your work includes a call to action?
IVC: I don’t have an activist personality. I’m actually a total recluse and avoid people if I can, but I see my role as creating art and showing its beauty. I do a lot of artist talks, I just state what I see. I also know that I am complicit in it as well as everyone else. Every time I fly to Tanzania, I feel an incredible sense of guilt. But I tried to prove it to myself by doing the work. I do think that people have different roles in conveying a message, and my message is to create art.
A photograph of a Kilimanjaro glacier, featured in Van Koller’s book The Last Glacier of Kilimanjaro.Courtesy of Ian Van Kohler
GH: You often combine your photos with research by scientists who study the area. Why is this important to you?
IVC: I want to go beyond pictures of melting glaciers, something we see so often. We see a beautiful picture of a melting glacier, which is sad, but what’s the point of entry beyond that? I realize I don’t know much and I want to know more. So I became friends with scientists.In most of my books I include Essay Provided by scientists, this allows them to interpret the photos as they wish.
GH: Who is your audience?
IVC: Some universities have large special collections and actively collect the books I make and show them to students. For example, Stanford has a collection of nearly every book I make, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a large collection of my books. There are other less active collections, like the original The Last Glacier book at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was on display for four months and now it’s in the archives somewhere. But I will take every opportunity to share my work.I am very active Instagram and Facebook, I have an exhibition. No matter how I show the work I do.
GH: What can photography do that science cannot?
IVC: Science used to not be like that. Alexander von Humboldt was an artist and a scientist. I feel like science is getting narrower and more and more audiences can’t get to it. I’m a college professor and I pick up these scientific papers and the language is really hard. So non-scholars don’t go out of their way to read scientific papers about specific glaciers. I think art helps bridge that gap. My purpose in working with scientists is to help scientists become artists again.
A photograph of a Kilimanjaro glacier, featured in Van Koller’s book The Last Glacier of Kilimanjaro.Courtesy of Ian Van Kohler
A video flip of “The Last Glacier of Kilimanjaro” can be found here.
