Can be viewed at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico through March 17, 2025, Tristan Duke: Glacial optics revolves around a series of large-scale photographs of Arctic landscapes, taken with a lens the artist created from the ice of the region’s glaciers.
The project began in the spring of 2022, when Duke embarked on a polar expedition to locate ice clear enough to make a functioning camera lens. The resulting portraits of glaciers – focused by their own ice – were captured on giant negatives using a deployable tent camera.
After returning from the Arctic, Duke trained his ice lenses on the effects of wildfires in the American West. While nothing seems further from the icy landscapes where the project began, in the context of the climate crisis – where human influences are causing massive droughts – the connection is clear: as glaciers melt, forest fires rage.
In 2023-2024, Duke turned its attention to the scientists looking for answers in glacial ice through residencies and projects with several leading laboratories. Paleoclimatologists reconstruct detailed climate histories spanning hundreds of thousands of years using ice core samples, while astrophysicists search deep in the glacier beneath the South Pole for elusive ‘ghost particles’. Based on these findings, Duke reveals surprising stories encoded in Earth’s ice.
Duke’s fusion of conceptual and material approaches expands the scope of photography and positions it as a formal, social, and ecological practice. Combining medium and message, Duke invites viewers to consider the ‘gaze of the glacier’, the effects of drought, the passage of time and what endures.
Visit for more information sitesantafe.org.
