http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/comparative-photography
July 16, 2010, 5:00 pm
Photos Reveal Receding Himalaya Glaciers
By KERRI MACDONALD
“There’s a lot of people who either don’t understand climate change that well and the effects that it’s having, or they want to deny the effect it’s having. These pictures are worth a thousand words. We haven’t done anything to them except print them.”
David Breashears,, a senior fellow with the Center on U.S.-China Relations, referred to the exhibition, “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya,” which opened this week at the Asia Society in Manhattan. Mr. Breashears is best known for directing the Imax film, “Everest.” In the exhibition, pictures taken as early as 1899 are placed alongside recreations by Mr. Breashears, who photographed the same places from precisely the same vantage, beginning in 2007.
One of the earlier photographers whose trail Mr. Breashears followed was George Leigh Mallory, the man behind the famous response to the question, Why keep climbing? “Because it’s there.”
Glacial Time Machine
The “Rivers of Ice” site allows viewers to see what glaciers looked like in the early 1900s.Mr. Mallory endorsed brandy, cigarettes and lemon drops as useful stimulants in high altitudes and disappeared in 1924 on his third attempt to climb Mount Everest. His body was discovered in 1999. His legacy is now proving invaluable. The photographs Mr. Mallory took during his ascents, immaculately preserved, turn out to be environmentally revealing as a visual documentation of climate change.
Also in the exhibition is the work of Vittorio Sella, described by Mr. Breashears as one of history’s greatest landscape photographers.
“Although this stuff’s all very pretty,” Mr. Breashears said as he gazed around the Asia Society gallery, “it tells a very sad story.”
The work, part of his Glacier Research Imaging Project, paints a stark picture of climate change in the Himalayas, where some of the world’s largest subpolar ice reserves are found. It is difficult to ignore the contrast between an image of Kyetrak Glacier taken around 1921 and the same view in 2009.
The work that went into each image was substantial. For one shot, Mr. Breashears and his team returned to their base camp empty-handed three out of four times over the course of 19 days to get the perfect picture.
“I’ve climbed Everest five times, and I would rather do that again than reach some of these photo points,” Mr. Breashears said. “Climbers, they choose good routes. A photographer chooses a position; a vantage point.”
David Breashears, Courtesy of GlacierWorks Shooting a panoramic photograph of the West Rongbuk Glacier.Mr. Breshears recorded GPS coordinates for the locations that he and his porters visited so that someone else can document further changes as the years go on. In the meantime, he plans to expand his coverage of the Himalayas.
“This is not enough of the puzzle,” he said. “It’s a bit of forensic work. It’s adventure. It’s art and science. It’s a real detective story.”
The archival photos are so good they could make an exhibition by themselves. But there’s more to this show. Technology also plays a large role. Using a camera with a robotic head, Mr. Breashears created images one billion pixels large to ensure their archival utility. He also produced stereo pairs so the scenes can be viewed online in three dimensions — as soon as that technology exists.
“You can only reach so many people with a big photo exhibit,” Mr. Breashears said. “The people whose minds we want to change are the 15-year-olds who, in 10 years, can have their Ph.D. and will have come out looking at the world with a different ethos.”
Understanding Scale
The dotted line shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier’s height in 1921. This photo from 2007 reveals a loss of 320 vertical feet in ice mass since George Mallory took the same photograph in 1921.
A detail of the yellow box is shown below.
The climber (upper right) gives scale to the ice pinnacles, Main Rongbuk Glacier, Jimmy Chin, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.
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