Ice floe, fog and mist. The unfettered Romanticism at work in these pictures recalls names from the Early 19th century: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Constable, James Cook. English seekers whose minds went south.

Coleridge ate a lot of opium. At Cambridge he was mixing his own -- up to 5 drops an hour. A good tincture would knock you down without knocking you out and this was good because lectures at Christ's Hospital ran on. William Wales was ship's astronomer the day James Cook became the first mariner to cross the Antarctic circle. Turning back, they never made Antarctica, but a lecture by Wales woke Coleridge. His Ryme of the Ancient Mariner mirrors Cook's journey.

Almond, who did land on the continent, saw little green. Blue, even some red, but not green. He credits this lack -- of green, of a tree line -- with confounding a human sense of scale, of space. But this apparent lack yields new spaces too: wild, irregular and lawless spaces. Coleridge, it seems, cribbed Wales' lecture for more than structure. His poem, like these photographs, takes us beyond our frame and past the familiar tree line.

Coleridge timeless mariner is punished for shooting an Albatross. His crew is killed and he is deprived of potable H₂0.

It's another lack with yields; for Coleridge it was visions and a leap into the supernatural. Almond's photographs too seem to mark a journey beyond the natural, past non-fiction. Time, here, is a function of the mysterious phase changes of water. It's all we see: black sea-flow, grey vapor, white pack-ice. H2O: the only chemical compound on Earth found simultaneously as solid, liquid and gas. Denser as liquid than solid (most solids sink in their own liquid) water is a scientific freak. And so in these pictures it floats -- illustrating a constant flux from white through blue to black and back.

If photographers traditionally use contrast to order spatial relations, here distance and proximity wear the same disguise. The density of Almond's negatives read more like calendars than maps. Alternating contrasts from light to shade seems to mark time better than space. Water created 3 billion years ago is still in existence; its shifting is unending. Almond recalls pouring Irish whiskey over opaque glacial ice. The slow melting, the drinking. Then leaving it back into the dim sea rushing beneath clear ice dating from the Mesozoic. Another crazy clock perhaps but seas here don't always tick by.

This reflection of stillness is in these pictures too. A silence in which the communion of man and nature finds a voice -- a voice less dark and temperamental than Coleridge's, less cumulous than Constable's. A stillness that disturbs with joy.

Constable labeled his painting both a 'science' and a 'feeling' and his cloud studies share with Coleridge's verse an urge to push beyond the tree line and into a moment of extension -- in which the artist does not merely praise nature, he conducts it through a distinct imaginative response. Almond is using camera negative here in the mode of Constable. At once combining scientific observation with emotive response. But if Almond's prints bear the watermark of 19th century Romanticism, it is through the medium of photography itself that Almond inches toward silence.

Coleridge argued that man's creativity takes God's creativity for its model; human perception could be pushed most precisely at nature's emptied edges. Artists like Coleridge and Constable were concerned to document the present tense encounter between themselves and nature -- the ability of a word or brush-stroke to capture the fleeting image. Although Almond actually traveled to Antarctica, his images concern themselves less with this heroic intersection than with opening a space for the viewer.

Though any camera instantly consigns each moment to the past, there can exist a present tense for the viewer. In these photographs the world of nature is both created and perceived by Almond's lens -- at once imagined and actual. What constitutes reality is a dynamic synthesis in which nature is seen as both "made" and glimpsed by the camera. Almond's is a deceptively passive instrument, reflecting nature as water reflects the sky, while allowing for an active encounter between viewer and object: a chance at being there, if only for a moment.

Coleridge, Constable and Cook shared a desire to acquire. To fix, freeze or conquer fleeting moments in an act of active discovery. Their present tense was the Romantic notion of man confronting nature and marking it. The 19th Century artist/explorer was the fulcrum of this equation. Almond's photographs function not simply records of the artist's extension, but rather speak to another present tense - the spectator's vigilance. There is a further deprivation in Coleridges' poem: sleep. Finally the Albatross slips from his neck:

Down but not quite out. This is the state Coleridge liked best, the slow slip into sleep, into the threshold between slumber and vigilance - a threshold in which nature makes strange. Almond also tells of falling asleep down there - in the middle of Drake's passage, on watch. Water has a way of doing that too.

Brad Barnes
October 2002