My series, Sans Nom, was taken in 2008 in the Pridz Bay Region of East Antarctica between 1 am and 4 am, when the air was remarkably still, and a thin mist descended upon a group of neighboring icebergs locked into the winter sea ice. The silence and desolation were profound – as if time had stopped and eternity had taken hold.

Jean de Pomereu - Photographer

Traveling through this ice-scape felt like entering a lost city, resembling Atlantis, where the icebergs replaced monumental ruins. But these ruins had no names. Totems of the underworld transiting at the frozen interface of water and atmosphere - born of the perpetual transformation of the physical realm.

The ice crack represents the first fissure in this world of stillness and silence: The first dramatic sign of the coming spring breakup of the sea ice. At a time when the vulnerability of polar ice is made increasingly apparent by the work of scientists, it evokes the fragility, as well as the generative power of ice.

For me, Antarctica is an object of continued visual and intellectual fascination : A wilderness that, however much it is scrutinized and deconstructed, remains unmoved in its glacial quietude, its penetrating silence, and its ability to draw us, one degree at a time, toward the essential.

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