Grey Glacier · Chilean Patagonia
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Grey Glacier · Chilean Patagonia
Architecture of Ice
Grey Glacier, located in Torres del Paine National Park, is part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. It is about 28 kilometres long and 6 kilometres wide, ending in three large fronts that flow into Grey Lake.
Its intense blue colour comes from the enormous pressure accumulated over thousands of years. The weight of successive layers of snow expels air bubbles and forms extremely compact ice. As light passes through it, much of the red spectrum is absorbed while blue reaches our eyes with greater intensity.
In this photograph we were able to come close enough to appreciate astonishing details, including this blue cavern: one of the glacier’s most fascinating forms.
I remained before those forms for a long time. The ice still seemed to be doing something: opening doors, raising walls, letting light pass through. I understood that I was not photographing a cavern, but time working from within. That is Loquium for me: to stop hurrying the landscape until, somehow, it begins to speak.
Grey Glacier · Chilean Patagonia
Ice upon Ice
This is another section of the Grey Glacier wall. Here the ice ceases to look like a surface and rises into cavities, columns and passageways. Light enters through the cracks and turns everything it touches blue.
There was ice upon ice. Ancient snowfalls pressed against one another. Winters that took place long before us were still there, holding up those forms.
I looked at the wall and for a moment felt I was standing before the ruins of something that had not yet finished being built. The glacier opened rooms and closed them. It raised its walls and began to tear them down. No form was final.
Then I understood that ice does not preserve time: it pushes it towards us. Every crack, every hollow, every blue column was a part of that time coming into the light.
I stayed there, before the Grey wall, while the ice slowly did its work. I was only trying to listen.
Grey Glacier · Chilean Patagonia
Unnamed Range
The Grey wall rose before us once again. This time I saw no doors or rooms. I saw a mountain range born within the glacier: white summits, ridges and towers that seemed to reach for the sky.
Clouds passed behind the ice and at times everything assumed an impossible scale. There were no trees, animals or people against which to measure those forms. Only whiteness rising against the dark.
Each tower held both the force that had raised it and the fall that would one day erase it. The glacier built upwards while time worked silently from below.
I thought of all the mountains we have looked upon as if they were eternal. They too rise, fracture and disappear. They too are still happening.
I made the photograph as light travelled across the summits of ice. Before that unnamed range, for an instant, everything seemed to be coming into being.
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Portfolios disponibles
An entry into bodies of work developed as independent projects, from Antarctic ice to the mountains of Torres del Paine.
Project 01 · Antarctica
Beyond Time
A visual journey into a landscape where time appears written in ice, mist and sea.
View portfolio
Project 02 · Torres del Paine
Torres
del Paine
A visual journey through a landscape where stone, water and light seem to hold time still.
View portfolio“Let yourself go, look into the distance, play with every element the landscape offers, be moved, marvel... feel the hair rise on your skin when you are there, want to continue, enjoy the tiredness... that “pleasant feeling of fatigue”, feel yourself slowly merging with the landscape, shake everything off, be yourself, delight like a child... only then might we have a chance to convey emotion through our images.”
GVIVANCO