09-08-2025
Tristan Duke Sees Things We Don't
What's Tristan Duke — polymath, experimental photographer, lavish tinkerer, and winner of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's prestigious Art and Technology prize — been up to lately?
I mean, besides the body of work featured in the sumptuous, just-released Radius Books monograph on his Glacial Optics project, Duke's continuing act of witness to some of the most wrenching effects of human-made climate change.
This series grew out of his recent practice of fashioning camera lenses out of pure ice, a notion he first got from happening upon the lab notes of a third-century Chinese alchemist who had enjoyed setting fires with polished globes of ice. Duke developed an exacting methodology for molding a series of such ice globes and meticulously calibrated ice lenses as well, through which he, yes, set fires but then also started taking photographs.
He would attach his frozen lenses to the aperture of a portable tent camera obscura which he had also concocted and which he presently took along on a quite eventful Arctic expedition.
In 2022, sailing north of the 78th parallel and leaning out from the rim of the research vessel on whose expedition he'd been invited, Duke hauled up diamond-pure chunks of ancient glacial ice. He then shaped those into perfectly translucent lenses that he trained back on the glaciers themselves. Allowing the whole calamitous situation, as it were, to photograph itself. Then, he went off to photograph burn scars all over the Southwest through the same sorts of ice lenses, to equally harrowing effect.
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