Tristan Duke’s “Gaze of the Glacier” Captures Our Planet on the Brink

On view at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico through March 17, 2025, Tristan Duke: Glacial Optics centers on a series of large-scale photographs of Arctic landscapes, made with a lens the artist fashioned from the ice of the region’s glaciers. 

The project began in the spring of 2022, when Duke embarked on an Arctic expedition to locate ice clear enough to shape into a functioning camera lens. The resulting portraits of glaciers — focused through their own ice — were recorded on giant negatives, using a deployable tent camera. 

After returning from the Arctic, Duke trained his ice lenses on the effects of wildfires across the American West. Though nothing would seem further from the frigid landscapes where the project began, in the context of the climate crisis — where human impacts drive massive drought — the connection is clear: as glaciers melt, wildfires rage. 

In 2023–24, through residencies and projects with several leading laboratories, Duke turned his attention to the scientists who look for answers in glacier ice. Paleoclimatologists reconstruct detailed climate histories spanning hundreds of thousands of years using ice core samples, while astrophysicists hunt for elusive “ghost particles” deep within the glacier beneath the South Pole. Drawing on these findings, Duke reveals surprising narratives encoded in Earth’s ice. 

Duke’s melding of conceptual and material approaches expands the purview of photography, positioning it as a formal, social, and environmental practice. Fusing medium and message, Duke invites viewers to contemplate the “gaze of the glacier,” the effects of drought, the passage of time, and what endures.

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