Climate change and the melting of the Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya.
1934
Fire and Ice
UK www.simonnorfolk.com
“These fire lines represent where the front of Mount Kenya’s Lewis Glacier was at various times. A harvest moon lights the poor, doomed glacier remnant; the gap between the fire and ice ‘snout’ represents the relentless melting. Relying on old maps, GPS data and mapping surveys from peer-reviewed journals, I have recreated a stratified history of the glacier’s retreat. Mount Kenya is the eroded stump of a long-dead, 6,000 meter mega-volcano. Photographically, I hope to reawaken its magma heart. My pictures contain no evidence that this glacier’s retreat is due to manmade warming but it is nonetheless my belief that humans burning hydrocarbons are substantially to blame.” Simon Norfolk
Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer whose work over fifteen years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word ‘battlefield’ in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world’s worst war-zones and refugee crises, but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or test-launches of nuclear missiles.
His work has been widely recognised, most recently winning the 2013 Prix Pictet Commission.
He has produced four monographs of his work including most recently Burke+Norfolk; Photographs from the War in Afghanistan in 2011. He has work held in major collections in The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and The Getty in Los Angeles. His work has been shown widely and internationally and in 2011 his ‘Burke+Norfolk’ work was a solo show at Tate Modern.