Antarctica, the tourist gaze and the sound of climate change

Antarctica

The Tourist Gaze & The Sound of Climate Change

Lisa M. Sadler

MA Photography

PHO740 Collaboration

& Professional Locations

Colin Pantell

Falmouth University

Penryn, Cornwall

Statement of Intent

In the past six-months, I acquired 35mm slides of tour trips to Antarctica. With climate change destroying the planet, especially this once immaculate continent, I started noticing similarities. Much like Antarctica, these images represent several things.

Abandonment; these discarded and forgotten images are a stark reminder of how we treat the continent.

The materiality of the image, fading away, falling apart and covered in dust and dirt, cannot be saved. We can try to scan it to preserve it or tape it; unless we restrain from handling the image, it will fall apart.

Much like ownership, these memories of someone else's yesterday can no longer exist. Only to be acquired from creating new memories.

Tourism: Tourists are responsible for the destruction of this once uncorrupted environment. The images are from tours taken during the 1970s through the early 1990s. It's easy to get lost and forget the age of the image. Imagine how much has changed in the past four decades

Continuation:

Everyone releases themselves from the responsibility of the past and wants to lay the blame elsewhere. But people are just as responsible for the past as they are for the present. Drawing attention to one of the main tourists found in two carousels of images, I attempted to make her the main character in my project, happy and carefree while everything around her is falling apart.

Now with the latest news of the Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier, barely hanging on by its fingernails, scientist state that the ice shelf could shatter in the next three to five years - resulting in a catastrophic sea level rise. This project is an attempt to sound the alarm.

Lisa M. Sadler

Nostalgia, literally means, the pain from an old wound.

It’s a twinge in your heart, more powerful than memory alone. This device is not a space ship, its a time machine. We can go backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place we ache to know again.

It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel.

Because it travels the way a child travels; round and round and back home again. A place where we know we are loved.

Madmen – The Carousel