Comparisons of Reality

As an ‘Artist to Antarctica’ in 2  2, Wellington contemporary photographer Anne Noble, saw beyond conventional portrayals of the South Pole, instead focusing on the changing light patterns in whiteouts, swirling ice-crystals and then in a twist, incorporating the real place with that of the manufactured. Noble’s ‘Ice Blink: Antarctic Photographs’, is part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. The exhibition is a series of images in which she behaved in the opposite way to a traditional landscape photographer: she did not place people in a scene to create a sense of scale or frame a dramatic view. But just as she visited the real place, Noble also travelled to Antarctic discovery centres around the world – including Japan, Norway and Australia. “I would go to these (manufactured) places and imagine I was an Antarctic landscape photographer taking conventional landscape photographs – it was a double entendre, I was looking at an artificial landscape but looking at it as if it were real.” ‘Ice Blink’ is on at the Centre for Contemporary Photography through October 25.