At 18,600 feet on Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap, Ian van Coller watched a team of geoscientists dig snow pits and drill ice cores for ten hours a day, collecting data. He had joined them in pursuit of understanding the glacier, to witness how deep time could be read, layer by frozen layer. Even as he documented the work, he found himself reckoning with the paradox that the scientists knew so much, and yet the scale and fragility of what they were studying remained elusive to the world, difficult to truly grasp.
 
That climb to the summit marked the genesis of Naturalists of the Long Now, a body of work that spans the Arctic and Antarctic, east Africa and the American west. Van Coller’s large-format photographs – of glaciers, tree rings and some of Earth’s oldest living species – are later annotated by the scientists he collaborates with, transforming each image into a field journal of sorts. It’s a reinvention of a genre that first captivated him as a young person, when he was drawn to the delicate, annotated drawings of Victorian-era botanists and ornithologists. In those images, he found the two things he loved most in the world – art and nature – in intimate dialogue. Now, in asking scientists to write directly onto his photographic prints, van Coller creates a new taxonomy of ice and climate, one that is as much a study in fragility as in fact. 

A South African-born artist and 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, van Coller creates books the size of tables and prints held in major public collections internationally, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For ten years, these collaborative portraits have been bridging the symbolic and the scientific in what is vanishing. 

This interview first appeared in Issue 06 of The Beautiful Truth. Get your copy here.

TBT: Can you tell us about your project, Naturalists of the Long Now? 

IC: I was speaking to a fellow photographer about my interest in glaciers as archives, mirroring the concept of deep time. He asked me if I’ve heard of the Clock of the Long Now – a clock that will run for 10,000 years with minimal human intervention as a way to reconceptualise how we think about time. 
 
It’s in our DNA: humans think about what’s present, what’s an hour from now, what’s tomorrow, maybe a week or a year beyond that. We don’t think about deep time. But as a humanity, we need to start thinking about what our choices mean for our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. There is an indigenous Iroquois philosophy: we must consider how our actions might impact our descendants seven generations from now. 
 
That’s my intent with Naturalists of the Long Now. I collaborate with scientists and have them annotate directly onto my photographic prints – palaeontologists who are using the Earth’s archives to look back in time. This can tell us stories about what Earth’s atmosphere might look like in the future based on their research into the past. 

TBT: Among rivers and forests, the project focuses primarily on glaciers. Why do you find them so interesting? 

IC: I came to this realisation when I was photographing glaciers once: at what point is it just another photograph of a melting glacier? And does the meaning stop there? I wanted to be able to tell a more complex story, and I didn’t know how to do that on my own. That’s when I decided to work with paleoclimatologists to tell that story. 
 
Glaciers are archives that allow us to look back in time. A glacier is formed by falling snow, which traps air. Over time, that gets compressed into a layer of ice, and around 10% of a glacier is air that was trapped at the time the glacier was formed. If we have a two million year old glacier, it’s an almost perfect archive of Earth’s atmosphere at that time. As glaciers melt, we’re literally losing that library. Some are already gone. It’s a desperate race to try to capture the stories these landscapes hold before they disappear. 

TBT: Your work has such important messages about climate change. Why is this important for you to do? 

IC: This is what artists do: they step out of culture to take a broader view and look back in to see what’s important – a sort of hyper view. Right now, what matters is climate change. In the 12 years I’ve been working on telling climate change stories, I have noticed a dramatic shift in perceptions on climate change. Part of that is because climate change is accelerating so fast, and we’re seeing more and more extreme weather events. I see my role as bringing awareness and shifting conversations. But I’m just one person doing my little thing. How, as artists, can we make a difference to the collective consciousness? 

TBT: How do you work with scientists while on site? 

IC: Some of the scientists I work with are good friends of mine; others are people I’ve never met before. The first scientist I worked with allowed me to accompany him to Peru and then to Kilimanjaro without having ever met me. When I’m with these scientists on their research sites, I have conversations with them: how does their research relate to climate change, deep time; what can it tell us about the past and possibly the future? Sometimes the conversations are just in the mess tents at night. 
 
I take photographs partly based on the conversations but mostly based on what I find interesting about that landscape. I’m very much a formalist, straightforward photographer. I’m interested in that rectangle of the photographic frame and how things interact with the edges of the frame. Beauty plays a key role in communicating to a broader audience. I’m very interested in the sublime, being in awe of nature. So when I make a photograph, I’m driven by the aesthetics of that place. I’m always trying to make an aesthetically beautiful, interesting photograph. 

TBT: How does it become a collaborative piece of art? 

IC: I go back to my studio, make big prints, and I ship a bunch to the scientists for them to annotate by hand. Many of them are nervous or apprehensive about their abilities, but every piece has been a beautiful expression of their idiosyncrasies as a scientist and a person. 
 
I’m fascinated by that process of collaboration with someone who’s never made art before. The biggest insecurity that I find is that they don’t like their handwriting. But even when there are mistakes and the handwriting is not the most elegant, I still think itresults in beautiful artwork. Humans are naturally artists; we’re expressive beings. I try not to influence them too much because I’m interested in scientists becoming artists again.

TBT: Tell us more about what you mean by that – scientists becoming artists. 

IC: Scientists used to be artists, trained in poetry and writing. Alexander von Homboldt – he was an extraordinary artist. One of my favourite works, which I think is truly incredible, is his map of Chimborazo [the highest mountain in Ecuador], with its combination of science and aesthetic beauty. He climbed higher than any European had climbed before, made careful recordings of plant species, atmospheric readings and barometric pressure to produce this incredible map of Chimborazo, which I think is an exceptional artwork. 
 
Today, scientists have become siloed in their research. Modern science tends to narrow over time: it reaches only a small, esoteric audience. I’m trying to help them break out of that – reach a wider audience and communicate their research in a more expressive way. 

TBT: Much of your work is printed into beautiful and sometimes huge books. Can you talk to us about why you do this? 

IC: I love making things by hand. I make big books because I’m in awe of the places I photograph. I’ve been given this gift to create beautiful images of these places and share them with others. And books, especially large-scale ones, have become my way of doing that. 
 
One of my greatest pleasures, aside from being in nature, is sharing my work with people through these books, watching them engage with them. Most of my books are collected by universities for special teaching collections, which I sometimes attend. The students are completely engaged and full of questions. That kind of engagement is something I’ve never experienced in an exhibition, where it feels uncomfortable and awkward. Showing a book is a completely different experience.