Fourteen Days on the Patagonian Ice

There is a particular silence to a glacier at four in the morning. Not the absence of sound, exactly, but the sense that the landscape is holding its breath along with you. I had carried two camera bodies and a wide lens up to the col the night before, and I lay awake most of it, listening to the wind test the guy lines.

The plan, such as it was, had three parts: walk in, find the light, walk out before the next front closed the pass. We managed roughly one and a half of those. The walk in went to schedule. The light, when it came, was so far beyond what I had hoped for that I forgot to be cold.

On waiting for weather

Most of adventure photography is waiting. You sit, you brew coffee that goes cold, you watch a ridge for the half hour each day when the sun does something the rest of the world will never see. I have learned to love the waiting almost as much as the photograph — it is the part that earns the frame.

The mountain doesn’t owe you a sunrise. When it gives you one, you’d better be standing in the right place.

On the ninth day we got our window. The clouds tore open from the west and for maybe twenty minutes the whole icefield turned the colour of a struck match. I made forty frames. I have kept three.

What I carried

People always ask about the kit, so: two bodies, three primes, far too many batteries kept warm against my chest, and a tripod that has now been to four continents and looks it. The gear matters less than the legs that carry it to the right place at the right hour.

If there’s a thread running through the work on this site — the adventure frames especially — it’s that. Show up, stay longer than is reasonable, and let the place decide what the photograph is going to be. We made it out a day late, soaked through, and grinning like idiots.

The prints are on the wall now. Every time I walk past the big one I can feel the cold again — which is, I think, the whole point of a photograph.