Provenance:
Patti Gilford Fine Art, Chicago

 

The series of photographs was created by Terry Evans for an exhibition, A Greenland Glacier: the Scale of Climate Change, held from February 7, 2009 to May 24, 2009 at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. 
 

"...I began to think about how to respond as an artist photographer to the work being done by K.U. Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. CReSIS measures the depth of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to understand the rate of melting and thus better understand the rate of climate change. I wanted to see Greenland.
Before I went to Greenland, I imagined that my work would be about describing the Jakobshavn Glacier for an audience back home, much like photographer William Henry Jackson did in 1871, when he accompanied geologist Dr. Ferdinand Hayden to Yellowstone, bringing back gorgeous photographs of that uncharted territory. 
My reality was different. I did aerially photograph, from a helicopter, the ice fjord leading to the Jakobshavn Glacier and I did photograph the glacier front and its surface, but what I saw was confusing and frustrating. I could not understand what I was seeing because there were no human markers below me on the ice. I had no sense of scale. Was that chunk of ice twenty stories high or knee high?
...My own frustration in trying to understand the scale of the glacier pointed out to me that understanding the scale of climate change is equally difficult."
Terry Evans

Other examples of Evans's complex aerial photographs, documenting the human impact on the environment, can be found in this sale – lots 102 and 134.