Frozen in time

The Herald Sun, 6 October, 2008

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Antarctica is literally the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the future of the planet.

As temperatures rise and the ice melts, the spectacular wilderness area, increasingly under threat, has become the focus of our anxiety.

Yet our relationship with the place remains fairly imaginary, according to New Zealand photographer AnneNoble, because most people never go there.

Instead, they get their ideas from an almostDisneyland construction of the place.

Noble says our sense of the Antarctica comes from the long tradition of 'heroic' photography, of explorers and adventurers, fromwilderness and tourism photography and museum displays that reinforce images we have already seen.

Bringing to our attention this idea of Antarctica is the subject of Noble's latest show Ice Blink, which will be part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

The photographic series documents all the artificial displays created in theme parks, research centres, aquariums and museums.

The 15 pictures in the exhibition were taken in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Norway, Scotland, the US and Britain between 2003 and 2007.

The images are at times jarringly kitsch but also beautiful and evocative.

They also expose a tragic naivety about an important environmental area.

You get a sinking feeling that one day these theatrical set-ups might be all that we have left of Antarctica.

Noble discovered these fake locations as she prepared for a two-week trip to the real Antarctica, where she eventually photographed the shifting patterns of light for a series examining the disorienting effects of whiteout.

As she visited these staged environments, she developed ideas about how people have these simulated experiences.

So there are images of security guards standing casually in a white wilderness landscape, people taking pictures with their mobile phones and of course the artificial parade of penguins watched by rows of people in plastic chairs.

'What most people know of Antarctica comes from photography and much of it is formulaic,' she says. 'I was interested in the global imaginary and this notion of the place being a fiction.

'For the past five or six years, whenever I'm somewhere I check out the relationship to Antarctica and Antarctic landscape photography. And I've built up this body of work that looks at how we look at Antarctica—the grandeur, the colour, the light, the penguins, the adventurers and discoverers—all played out in this artificial environment.

'There is a sadness and a number of themes and a question about the desire and longing for that transcendental feeling of place and how it becomes a thing we consume.

'If they make people laugh and feel a little bit uncomfortable then it means they're working. It's really about the nature of the looking and the leanness and the paucity of these awful, corny landscapes.'

Noble has work held inmajor collections including the National Gallery of Australia.

She will return to the Antarctic next month for six weeks as part of a US National Science Foundation delegation.