From thousands of miles away, the melting arctic haunts the tedium of our everyday, dulled by the suppression of climate anxiety necessary to accomplish a nine-to-five. Tristan Duke’s Glacial Optics, though—a new photography project in which Duke uses cores of arctic ice that he’s molded into a camera lens to capture melancholic images of the subsiding glacial landscape—refuses to let the viewer look away.

Duke, a Los Angeles-based photographer and recipient of the 2023/2024 LACMA Art and Technology Lab Grant, partnered with the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility (NSF- ICF), among others, to produce the Glacial Optics photobook, which is out this spring via Radius. The book forces the viewer to reckon with the disappearing Arctic—not through the distant, clinical gaze of satellite imagery or data models, but through ice itself. Duke’s work presses: look now, before it blurs further; before it all vanishes.

Painters like Fredric Edwin Church and William Bradford once mythologized the Arctic, framing it as an untouched, eternal frontier. Duke picks up where these 19th-century Arctic explorers left off, transforming romanticized visions of the Arctic. Time serves as both canvas and caution in Duke’s latest exploration—art as time capsule and prophecy, a record of memory and a forewarning of loss. The work started as a poetic vision: the discovery that glacial ice, under certain conditions, possesses an exceptional clarity. What if glaciers were more than just frozen remnants of time? What if they were lenses? Not just metaphorically, but literally compressed under the immense weight of eons, honed by wind and snow into natural optical instruments?

This idea of the glacier as an eye, as a vast and fragile observer, reveals a haunting truth: its perspective dwarfs our own, stretching across millennia, watching civilizations rise and fall. Yet, despite its enormity, it remains vulnerable, melting, retreating, vanishing before our eyes. We hold on to what we can, but time, like ice, is slipping through our fingers.