Dani Inkpen. Capturing Glaciers: A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming. Seattle: University of Washington Press, January 2024.

---

Photographs do not simply speak for themselves. Their meanings are built through interpretive frameworks that shift over time.

For many people who are not climate scientists, drastic recession of mountain glaciers is clear and persuasive evidence of global warming. Since most people have never been to a glacier, repeat photographs—juxtapositions of old photographs and recent re-creations taken from the same perspective at the same time of year—are often how they learn of disappearing ice. Indeed, these before-after images of receding glaciers have become icons of global warming. Yet, throughout the twentieth century those studying glaciers used photography to capture changes in glacier extent and distribution for different reasons and with different consequences. In Capturing Ice, I historicize the use of repeat glacier photographs, examining what they show, what they obscure, and how they influence public understandings of nature and climate change. Photographs of glaciers are about more than just glaciers. They are also about nature, land, how we can know about such things, and the value we ascribe to them.

Photographs of glaciers are about more than just glaciers. They are also about nature, land, how we can know about such things, and the value we ascribe to them.

My aim in the book is not to explain how repeat glacier photographs became icons. I’m concerned with understanding how photography was used to know glaciers and what knowledge-makers believed about their objects of study. Photographs of glaciers meant a variety of things during the twentieth century. At times, they meant little at all. A widely used form of visual evidence at the turn of the century, photography was less frequently deployed in glacier study at mid-century, taking a back seat to other forms of evidence before being picked up again in the early 2000s. The arc of the story, then, is an offset spiral. Understanding what occasioned the return—why photographs were accepted as evidence at one time, rejected at another, and taken up again more recently—requires attending to photography as both a tool of field science and a form of evidence, placing it among the changing techniques, methods, research agendas, and values of glacier study in the twentieth century. Doing so reveals how ideas about evidence and meaning are not pre-given but are situated and responsive to their time. It also reminds us that photographs contain their own limits.

By framing global warming as something that is happening to a pristine glacier “over there” and focusing our attention on a future when there will be no ice, repeat glacier photographs distract us from the fact that people are already living with the effects of global warming.

The current iconography of ice, I argue, comes at a price. It makes nature seem far from home. Iconographies of wilderness place global warming elsewhere, visually detaching environmental concern from everyday life. By framing global warming as something that is happening to a pristine glacier “over there” and focusing our attention on a future when there will be no ice, repeat glacier photographs distract us from the fact that people are already living with the effects of global warming. While it is not the responsibility of repeat glacier photographs to depict all aspects of global warming, by functioning as a dominant icon they overshadow other stories and lack important details. They portray glaciers as romantic soon-to-be fatalities of a looming global catastrophe. This portrayal doesn’t mean repeat glacier photographs are bad or that they should be done away with. It means there are problems with them that need to be thoughtfully considered. In my friendly critique of the use (and sometimes abuse) of repeat glacier photographs, I argue that these icons carry their histories with them, but they do so in nontransparent ways that require investigation to uncover. Putting these visuals in historic context deepens our understanding of the critiques lodged against them. It also reveals resources for thoughtfully recognizing their limitations and how they have shaped our perceptions.

Left: The author & the Bow Glacier, 2003. Right: Oblique aerial perspective of Columbia Glacier, 1969. Photo by Austin Post. Glacier Photograph Collection, National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colorado.

Both repeat photography itself and the form of the photographs were shaped by the prior history of glacier study, and not without consequence. Repeat glacier photographs begin with a foot in the past. It is unsurprising, then, that the past makes itself known through them, which is all the more reason to investigate histories of their making.

Feature Image: Muir Glacier, 1890, taken by Harry Fielding Reid. Glacier Photograph Collection, National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colorado