Photographer, writer, animator and mixed-media artist Julia Calfee is truly dedicated to producing extraordinary and mesmerizing works. Whether documenting the addled hallways of the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, travelling across remote Mongolia in a caravan or for her unrivalled 2016 project ‘A Glacier’s Requiem’, living underneath a moving glacier.
The glacier in question is the Länta in Switzerland, it lies 2,100m above sea level, and Calfee lived under the glacier for months, exposing herself to harsh arctic conditions to document the increasingly detrimental effects global warming is having on the earth’s glaciers.
Calfee’s striking black and white images capture the serenity and sheer vastness of the natural ice formations, and her use of light reflections on the ice produces ethereal shadows. Calfee has accompanied her haunting photography with sound recordings of the movements of the glacier. The distinctive sounds are reminiscent of the 50’s and 60’s experimental synthesisers.
By completely immersing herself in the scenery, Calfee is able to capture every single moment, every single sound and change; she saw the glacier melting before her eyes. Her intimate understanding of the subject allows her to capture the most important angles, exposing powerful and important issues that, like climate change, need to be kept foremost in society’s awareness. Calfee say she is not drawn to foreign and exotic destinations for their beauty necessarily, but for the underlying beliefs, cultures and natural phenomenons that bring us closer to ourselves, and the challenges of humankind.
© Julia Calfee
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Julia Calfee, A Glacier’s Requiem, Kehrer Publishing, Hedelberg and Pentagram Design, Berlin, Hardcover, October 25, 2016
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