South Bend Tribune, 4/11/2008
A look at photographer Camille Seaman and her latest exhibition, “The Last Iceberg,” that documents Earth’s polar regions and the icebergs that many scientists contend are headed to their end.

Melting away

By Jeremy D. Bonfiglio
Tribune Staff Writer

Source: features
Friday, April 11, 2008
Edition: mich, Page D1

Camille Seaman wanted to see where the water met the ice. She had arrived in Kotzebue, Alaska, a day earlier — the result of an adventurous whim and a free airline ticket that was set to expire.

When she began to walk across the frozen sea that morning she didn’t comprehend that her destination was 22 miles away. Seaman smiled at the perplexed Eskimos on snowmobiles who stopped to ask if she needed help. She politely replied, “I’m fine,” and kept walking. By afternoon, there were no more snowmobiles. No Eskimos either. It was just her and the ice.

“I turned around and I couldn’t see the town,” Seaman says by telephone from her photography studio in Berkeley, Calif. “Even though I was incredibly stupid and naive, on the walk back, I really felt that I met my planet for the first time.”

Since that 1999 stroll some 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Seaman has been trying to arrange an introduction for the rest of us. Her latest exhibition, “The Last Iceberg,” on display at Indiana University South Bend’s Franklin D. Schurz Library, documents Earth’s polar regions and the icebergs that many scientists contend are headed to their end.

“I used to be this crazy lady who takes pictures of ice,” Seaman says, “but two weeks after the U.N. said global warming was real, people starting calling about my work.”

One of those calls came from IUSB professor Jonathan Nashel. In January, Nashel was in Washington, D.C., for a history conference when he stumbled upon Seaman’s work at the National Academy of Sciences.

“I had no idea who she was, but her photos of these icebergs just knocked me out,” he says. “Her use of large format cameras was as good as anything I’ve ever seen.”

Aware that IUSB’s current theme is sustainability, Nashel became determined to bring Seaman’s images to campus.

“It was like an iceberg got lodged in my head,” he says. “This was just something people here had to see.”

When Nashel called Seaman, “The Last Iceberg” was ending its run at the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. So Seaman had the center send the entire exhibition to IUSB.

“The thing that got me,” Nashel says, “is they look real and unreal at the same time.”

Seaman, born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African-American mother, grew up in Long Island, N.Y.

With a penchant for drawing, Seaman applied to and was accepted at the LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts - best known for the film and television series “Fame.” At age 15, as part of an after-school program, Seaman was given her first camera, an old Nikromat, and access to a darkroom.

“I remember it felt so heavy,” she says. “It was the first real SLR I ever had.”

After graduating in 1987 alongside Jennifer Aniston, Seaman studied photography with John Cohen and Jan Groover on her way to a bachelor of fine arts degree from the State University of New York at Purchase.

“I always took for granted that I had photography,” Seaman says. “It was never something that I set out to do. I just always took pictures.”

After a move to California, she had stints as a surf bum, an assistant for an architecture firm and an adventure tour guide, but the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Seaman says, had a profound impact on her life and work.

“After Sept. 11 (the World Trade Center towers) weren’t there anymore, but I still had them in all of these photographs I had taken of the city,” she says. “That’s when I really understood the power of photography. A switch went on, and I knew I needed to photograph as much of my life and time as I can.”

When Seaman began her iceberg project in 2003, she studied what photographers had previously captured on film. What she saw were these bright white objects that didn’t resemble the icebergs she had seen firsthand.

The difference was in the use of light. Following lessons she learned from National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry, Seaman worked with neutral film settings, exposure times and overcast skies to capture the aqua-blue colors, textures and depth made by fissures in the ice.

“I want to make you feel what I felt,” Seaman says. “It’s more important for me to be emotionally accurate than to be visually accurate.”

The result, as is evident in “Dirty Iceberg, Cape Bird, Antarctica, 2006,” and “Iceberg Detail with Glaucous Gulls, East Greenland, 2006,” unveils the vibrant subtle colors of the ice sitting atop a dark sea.

“I immediately saw them as having personalities,” Seaman says of the various icebergs she’s encountered. “It hurts your mind. The sense of time involved to create something of that scale. You feel in awe, very humble, insignificant, mortal.”

Since her 1999 adventure, the 38-year-old Seaman has made multiple trips to Antarctica and the Arctic regions of Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, Norway, traveling by icebreaking ships with her secondhand Fuji GX617 in tow.

During these multiple excursions, Seaman has seen icebergs that have slowly eroded and ones that have dramatically collapsed into the sea. She also is aware that, much like her photographs of the Twin Towers, her work is preserving objects that may no longer exist.

“I want them to be recorded,” Seaman says. “They are so big and have so much presence, but they are responding to what’s happening (to the planet). So when I photograph an iceberg, I have that in my mind.”