STEFANO BALMA
LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
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"Shapes of Ice"
On the life of artic glaciers
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I will never forget the emotion I felt when I saw a glacier for the first time. It was during my first trip to Iceland: standing before the walls of Skaftafell felt like being in the presence of a millennial being. I observed it for several minutes, when among its crevasses I noticed a shape similar to a grimace of agony, like that of Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream: the glacier was screaming, but no one heard. I was deeply moved.​
That vision became the starting point of this photographic series that collects shots from my travels in Iceland and Greenland to poetically represent the melting process of Arctic landscapes. Glaciers and glacial fjords progressively fragment into icebergs until they become water, in a riot of wonderful shapes and colors.
The mutability of ice makes each landscape unique and unrepeatable. This dynamism is for me a source of reflection on the flow of life and its cyclical nature, but also an urgent warning: Arctic territories are experiencing a period of great transformation under unprecedented climatic and political pressures.
The preservation of these ecosystems determines the future of humanity, and the agony we read in the ice today could tomorrow be reflected in the faces of future generations.
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