The three-foot-wide color panoramas in this exhibition have been selected from the series On Antarctica, which comprises more than 1,000 pictures made in 1989 under the aegis of the National Science Foundation.
Although Antarctica is perhaps the most unwelcoming place on earth, science now flourishes on the continent. Every day the place becomes less unfamiliar. If Klipper’s photographs testify by their mere existence to this process of assimilation, they nevertheless evoke the unhuman vastness of Antarctica. In the exhibition brochure, curator Peter Galassi writes that the artist’s panoramas present “a landscape that is ravishing in its barren beauty, in its inhospitable grandeur, and in the delicacy of its ever-changing hues. The photographs seem to fuse the epic swoon of romanticism with the impersonal rigor of science.”
Organized by Peter Galassi, curator, Department of Photography.
