Niall O’Leary and the team at Millennium Images in London, have created an online portfolio of my Arctic and Antarctic images under the banner of “The Cold Edge“. You can see the selection of images here, or read on for more:
I’ve written an artists statement to accompany the images:
I have succumbed to the draw of the Polar Regions; a slave to its unforgiving climate, the simple, savage food chain, the landscapes, seascapes and icescapes. The high Arctic and Antarctic still lie largely beyond the reach of most of us 7 billion, but not from the effects of our lifestyles – climate change and ocean acidification are just two of the threats driven by our spiraling use of fossil fuels.
It’s these concerns, along with the light and the infinite degrees of colour that lure me back; the harsh 24-hour glare of summer, the long shadows of morning and evening, and the dark sunless days of winter when the aurora and moon dictate the rules to photographers. I don’t enjoy the cold, but I love those grey days when the light is abundant and precise, refracted through the dense blue ice of glacier fragments. The iceberg blues defy both imagination and the senses, leaving me with nothing but my images as testimony to my experience.
I’m told my images emanate a quiet tension; perhaps my passion for nature and the polar zones is tempered with my unease that all may not be right in the Garden of Eden. We humans are only starting to grasp how we are fouling our own nest, and how our daily behaviour has repercussions elsewhere. It’s a small world, after all.
The Cold Edge – Images by Dave Walsh
Based in London, Millennium Images holds more than 30,000 contemporary photographic art images by over 600 photographers, representing the best in contemporary photography.Visit Millennium Images website.
The Millennium images website reads:
“Dave Walsh is a photographer, writer and environmental campaigner from Wexford, in the south east of Ireland. With an interest in human interaction with the natural environment, Walsh has sailed on board numerous Greenpeace expeditions to far-flung places, including several trips to the Arctic and Antarctic, where he has produced a number of breathtaking images.”
“In December 2011, Dave is traveling to northern Finland to make photographs – where the sun will have already set for the year.”