Above images taken at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska in their exhibition, Extra Tough: Women of the North

Ice Fields

Ice Fields is an ongoing photographic project that explores and records glacial albedo – the proportion of light reflected by the surrounding snow and ice. As glaciers melt, their ice reflects less sunlight and more of the sun’s radiation is absorbed by the darker rocks and surrounding environment – a positive feedback loop that increases glacial melt and retreat. 

Since 2017, I have been making long-exposure photographs of glaciers on the Juneau Icefield in my large-format camera. Paper is coated with cyanotype and exposed to a full day of sunlight, creating a negative image of the surrounding environment. To stop the exposure process, I then rinse - or “fix” - the photograph with glacial meltwater. Because the albedo is so high, and because the cyanotype process is less reactive than traditional film photography, I am able to create long-exposure photographs that capture entire days of glacial light.

These images serve as a direct record of a rapidly changing landscape, my own riff on “repeat photography,” a glacier-monitoring method during which a glacier is photographed from the same view year-over-year to provide objective visual evidence of change. Over time, my photographs will continue to document glacial melt on the Icefield; the deep blue recorded in my images will eventually disappear.