You Can’t Photograph a Glacier

There is a sound a glacier makes that I was not prepared for.

We were in Disenchantment Bay, and the ship turned a full circle so that everyone on board got the same view of Hubbard. The water was so turquoise it looked slightly fake. And then, somewhere inside the ice, a crack — deep, earth-shattering is how I described it at the time and I still cannot do better than that. It does not necessarily mean anything falls. The whole glacier is moving. It does not look like it is moving, because it is frozen. But it is.

Then I photographed it, and the photograph was a thin blue line.

That is the honest version. In a picture, Hubbard is a pale band sitting on top of the water. It could be a sandbar. It could be weather. The only thing in any of those frames that rescues it is one of the little tour boats that were out there — and the moment a boat is in the shot, you understand. Not because the boat is interesting. Because the boat is a known quantity, and the ice beside it suddenly is not.

The problem is not the camera

I would like to tell you this is a gear problem, because gear problems are solvable.

At Crater Lake I did not have a lens wide enough to get the whole thing in one shot. That was years ago, back before phones handled wide angle well, and it would be easy to say the equipment has caught up since. It has, mostly. It did not fix this.

The redwoods are where I have had to stop blaming equipment. They are very hard to photograph because the scale simply does not translate. You can put a person out there — that helps, the same way the boat helps — but you are still not going to take a picture of the whole tree. I find it difficult to take the picture I want of the redwoods. I am still trying to figure it out, I guess is what I would say.

Three places. Three different trips. The same complaint every time, and I have never once solved it on location.

Scale is a relationship, and a photograph cuts it

Here is what I think is actually happening. When you stand in front of something enormous, your body is doing the measuring. The cold coming off it. The angle your neck has to make. The sound arriving a beat late. You are not looking at a large object so much as being told, by about six senses at once, that you are small.

A photograph keeps the shapes and throws away every single one of the things that was doing the measuring. So the viewer needs a substitute, and the substitute has to be something whose size they already know by heart. A boat. A person. A car at the trailhead.

Which is the irritating part: the reference object is almost always the thing you travelled a very long way to keep out of the frame. Nobody flies to Alaska for the tour boat.

What I actually do about it

Two things, neither of them a solution.

The first is to give in and put the human thing in on purpose — the boat, the figure on the path — and accept that the picture is now partly about the boat.

The second works better, and it took me longer to arrive at: stop photographing the whole thing. Photograph the part of it that is actually the right size for a frame. Some of my favourite frames from Alaska are not the glacier at all. They are mist sitting in the spruce outside Juneau, trees going to silhouette against white — a small, quiet subject that fits. That picture works precisely because I stopped arguing with the scale and photographed something the frame could hold.

I am not claiming to have this figured out. Every so often I end up standing in front of something that is simply bigger than a rectangle, and I take the picture anyway, and the picture is a thin blue line. Then I go home and look for the boat.

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