A pole of inaccessibility is the point in any landmass that is hardest to reach. Every continent has one, and in 1958 a Soviet exploration team reached the remotest of them all – Antarctica’s. At an altitude of some 3,700m, the average temperature there is negative 60 degrees making it the coldest place on earth.
In proper Soviet fashion, they made the 2,100km journey in ten giant ‘Pingvin’ treaded machines, and left behind them an abandoned research station topped with the bronze bust of Vladimir Lenin. It still surveys the snows.
Antarctica, perhaps more than any other continent, places our human world against the stark backdrop of infinite nature. A new book of photography, ‘Antarctica: the Colours of the Cold Desert’, offers a glimpse into this juxtaposition.
As the photographer, Buenos Aires local Marcelo Gurruchaga, writes in the introductory essay: “In a very partial and limited way, the photographs represent the enormity of this continent that holds within it the greatness of the infinite and the anguish of the finite.”
“My trip to Antarctica,” he goes on, “started with a question and ends with the certitude that here, in the most deserted desert on the planet, we are but a speck in nature.” The photos themselves are brilliant. “The colours of Antarctic minute to minute,” he goes on, “ice, sunsets and dawns, blue skies and clouds and fog create a dazzling pallet.” And flipping through the pictures of these desolate and beautiful places does perhaps give one a glimmer of this feeling.
While the introduction is short, it is a rich blend of personal narrative and historical fact (my only critique being that the book would benefit from a couple more such pieces of writing). In it we learn that the way the world has dealt with Antarctica reflects the author’s own awe when confronting the immensity of nature.
The 1961 Antarctic treaty ensures that, “in Antarctica, only peaceful activities can take place, use of nuclear energy is prohibited, and there is a commitment towards natural resource conservation and preservation.” And like no other place in the world, Gurruchaga writes, “there is a sense of cooperation between and coexistence amongst people of all nationalities.”
French existentialist philosopher and novelist Albert Camus thought that, when placed against the blank indifference of nature, all the absurdities of human existence are brought into sharper focus. He believed that, even becoming aware of it, we could never escape the silliness of our condition. But I choose to believe, with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, that seeing our world placed against the profundity of nature can give us the insight put aside the things that really don’t matter.
Living in Buenos Aires, immersed in the traffic and the boliches, the steep walls rising up around you, it’s easy to forget that anything else exists, that anything else matters. This is, as V.S. Naipaul said, “an overwhelming metropolis,” tautological even, with its own value system, its own truths, things we might do well to question.
Unchanging in the face of all that nature, Vladimir’s bronze countenance will forever project the sad dreams of a fallen empire and a failed ideology onto the indifferent ice. But we all carry our Lenins with us, the beliefs we should have questioned long ago. By offering a glimpse into the vastness, ‘Antarctica’ reminds us to question what they are.
Antarctica: the Colours of the Cold Desert is available at bookstores throughout Buenos Aires. It will be officially released at a presentation and party at 6:30pm, 26th August, at the Argentine University of Business (UADE), Lima 717.