Tristan Duke: Glacial Optics
Published by Radius Books, July 2025
Artwork by Tristan Duke
Foreword by Michael Govan
Texts by Brandee Caoba, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Lucy Lippard
Using camera lenses made of Arctic ice, Tristan Duke's ongoing, experimental photographic project, Glacial Optics, explores our current moment of climate crisis.
In the spring of 2022, artist Tristan Duke set sail for the Arctic Island of Svalbard, the fastest-warming place on the planet. His goal was to craft functioning camera lenses from the very ice of the glaciers. Through melting ice lenses, Duke captured portraits of an Arctic landscape in quiet turmoil. These ephemeral lenses became the foundation for a photographic series imagining the "gaze of the glacier" as a means of confronting the global climate emergency.
On returning from the Arctic, Duke turned his ice-lens camera to document massive wildfires raging across the American West — bringing the melting glaciers to bear witness to the smoke and fire of the Anthropocene.
Next, Duke traveled the US, visiting labs where scientists study glacier ice for clues to better predict our climate future. By laying ice core samples directly on large sheets of photo paper, Duke created photograms, distilling the concept of the ice lens into formal studies of light moving through ice.
Glacial Optics includes essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Brandee Caoba, with a foreword from Michael Govan, as well as the artist's field notes and original research chronicling the unlikely history of ice lenses.
Hardcover with fold-out insert
9 x 12.5 inches
180 pages / 90 images
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Image Ecology
Published by C/O Berlin Foundation / Spector Books, 2023
Edited by Boaz Levin and Kathrin Schönegg
Image Ecology offers an survey of new approaches to environmental photography. In an attempt to document the systemic causes of the climate crisis, works in the exhibition explore their own material and social conditions. The exhibition disentangles photography as an ecological practice, a medium that is defined as much by the nexus of material, labor, energy and waste that its production and circulation require as by what it represents.
thread-sewn hardcover
17 x 24 cm
158 pp
96 b/w and color illustrations
Available here
Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production
Published by Spector Books, 2022
Edited by Boaz Levin, Esther Ruelfs, Tulga Beyerle
Texts by Siobhan Angus, Nadia Bozak, Boaz Levin, Christopher Lützen, Brett Neilson, Christoph Ribbat, Esther Ruelfs, Sven Schumacher, Karen Solie, Julia Wiedenmann
Photography has always depended on the extraction and exploitation of so-called natural raw materials. Having started out using copper, coal, silver, and paper—the raw materials of analogue image production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—photography now relies, in the age of the smartphone, on rare earths and metals like coltan, cobalt, and europium. The exhibition focuses on the history of key raw materials utilized in photography and establishes a connection between the history of their extraction, their disposal, and climate change. Looking at historical and contemporary works, it tells the story of photography as a history of industrial production and demonstrates that the medium is deeply implicated in human-induced changes to nature. The exhibition shows contemporary works by a range of photographers and artists, including Ignacio Acosta, Lisa Barnard, F&D Cartier, Susanne Kriemann, Mary Mattingly, Daphné Nan Le Sergent, Lisa Rave, Alison Rossiter, Metabolic Studio’s Optics Division, Robert Smithson, Simon Starling, Anaïs Tondeur, James Welling, Noa Yafe and Tobias Zielony, along with historical works by Eduard Christian Arning, Hermann Biow, Oscar and Theodor Hofmeister, Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt, Hermann Reichling, and others, and historical material from the Agfa Foto-Historama in Leverkusen, the Eastman Kodak Archive in Rochester and the FOMU Photo Museum in Antwerp as well as mineral samples collected by Alexander von Humboldt from the collection of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.
thread-sewn paperback
19 x 25 cm
176 pp.
20 black-white and 74 colour illustrations
Available here
3D: Double Vision
Published by Delmonico Books in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018
Edited by Britt Salvesen, with contributions by Thomas Banchoff, Eric Drysdale, Erkki Huhtamo, and Gloria Sutton
This book follows the advancement of 3D photography over the decades, showing how the practice has evolved and, ironically, returned to its most basic form of expression. Pursuing a career-long obsession, author Britt Salvesen explores the origins and impact of the stereoscope, featuring historic images by Jules Duboscq, Oskar Fischinger, Salvador Dalí, and others. She traces the invention to the dawn of film, and then to its post-World War II iterations, such as the ViewMaster, lenticular printing, and holography. Readers learn how 3D photography became incorporated into the work of such artists as John Baldessari, Dan Graham, and Andy Warhol. Encompassing more than 100 years of innovation and experimentation, and covering a wide range of genres, artists, and forms—from sophisticated perceptual experimentation to popular cinema—this volume shows how the mystery of 3D images remain appealing to 21st-century artists and audiences. Each book includes 2 sets of glasses (one stereoscopic and one anaglyph), to enhance readers’ appreciation of the possibilities in this multi-dimensional form of artistic expression.
hardcover
9.75 x 11.3 inches
208 pages
Available here
Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder
Published by Delmonico Books in association with MASS MoCA, 2016
By Denise Markonish, with contributions by Lawrence Weschler, Sean Foley, Steven Holmes, and Kay Redfield Jamison
This book is a clarion call to artists, writers, and scientists to explore their willingness to wonder and drive to discover. Inspired by a quote from Ray Bradbury, “Explode Every Day” is a bold new exhibition harnessing the energy of wonder. This book features works touching on certain facets of wonder, including themes of the perceptual/visionary, technological/scientific, and time/cosmos. In compelling essays on the history of wonder and its intersection with myriad disciplines, including psychology, literature, and science, today’s great minds consider the many avenues for this phenomena. Interviews with the exhibition’s artists provide insight into individual processes of creativity and innovation. The result is an awe-inspiring exploration of the richness of wonder: from the every day to the ineffable.
hardcover
7.3 x 9.8 inches
336 pages
Available here