Photographer Heidi Romano is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. These images are from her project ‘Frozen Water‘. To see Heidi’s body of work click on any image.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.”
Robert Frost
The micro environments found in “Frozen Water” are an experiment in form finding. They are a challenge to the perceptions and expectations we have of water. There is a detailed, random beauty to the elements within these images. They create landscapes that can be viewed in a space between reality and imagination.
“Frozen Water” brings together three long-standing photographic interests,
or worlds of mine: macro photography, landscapes, and imagination.
I am curious about ways in which the slightest shift can seem monumental and how ones imagination might be triggered. How can a mundane event be turned into an extraordinary one?
In the winter, when I take my lunch into the sunroom, I say to my partner,
“I’m going to the south of France for lunch.” It’s a bit like this with the relationship between the images within the series of “Frozen Water,” and their titles:
The titles of the individual photographs have been taken from ships that collided with icebergs. Some sank. Others were damaged.
The images are ice-cubes, sheets, or trays of frozen water. I have no means to travel to the Antarctic, and glimpse a world so foreign to my own. Yet I can still make an iceberg by traveling from the sunroom in the South of France, to Antarctica, my studio, near the freezer. Geography isn’t always measured in km’s.
It was high summer here in Australia and the ice sheets were melting faster then I could photograph them. I took pleasure in searching for those precious, abstract landscapes within. As the climate changed, I heard the ice crackle and murmur. I kept watching as the icebergs were breaking free, and released the shutter as my sheets swam away.
Sheet after sheet rapidly melted and all that I had left was a puddle. I often let part of the sheet partially thaw and then refroze it, just to see what would happen. I photographed the delicate, fleeting moments of the ices transitions, saw it change and constantly transform.
Eventually even the largest sheet will melt.
See also:
By Heidi Romano
