New Zealand Life & Leisure: Review of ‘White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica’. 01 August 2008.
“Including a beautifully written introduction, this book succeeds in what Grahame hoped to achieve “…to tell the story of what fascinated me, what moved me most, and what I am privileged to have seen’’.
When it hasn’t disappeared completely for several months, the light in the Antarctic is a magician, cloaking night skies in a “trembling lacework” of auroras, turning grey snow into geometry of rainbows”, and throwing mirages towards the sun. Hoping to find out what else the Antarctic may be, Antarctica New Zealand in partnership with Creative New Zealand, has been sending writers, poets, print makers, sculptors, ceramicists, fashion and textile designers, jewellers, furniture makers, photographers, composers and choreographers down to the continent every summer since 1996.
The results as artist share their experience of the Antarctic environment through their various mediums are fascinating and often exquisite. Artist Grahame Sydney has ventured twice to the bottom of the world with his camera, capturing shots of crevasses and apricot light sandwiched between leaden skies and ice. There’s an air of desolation to memorial images and historic huts, while photos taken during October’s half light reveal an unexpected old-world softness as vast and empty spaces fade into hazy, pastel hues. Including a beautifully written introduction, this book succeeds in what Grahame hoped to achieve “…to tell the story of what fascinated me, what moved me most, and what I am privileged to have seen’’.
North & South: Review of ‘White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica’. 31 December 2008.
“…a brilliant book of evocative images accompanied by eloquent text…”
Artist Grahame Sydney found painting too difficult when he first visited Antarctica in 2003 – his fingers numbed, his paints froze. So instead he used his camera to document the wild white land that defies adequate description.
He returned in 2006 to take further photos and this is the result – a brilliant book of evocative images accompanied by eloquent text, paying homage to Antarctic artists before him. And before you baulk at the price, admire the quality of the printing – something that’s lacking in so many landscape books produced here.
The New Zealand Herald: Review of ‘White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica’. 06 December 2008.
“…and the result is a breath-taking collection of images taken from the sky and on land…”
Central Otago landscape artist Sydney has found a new eye and new direction since visiting Antarctica in 2003 and 2006. Unable to paint down there because of the freezing conditions, Sydney used the camera as his palette and the result is a breath-taking collection of images taken from the sky and on land, where he captured the strange beauty of a place most of us will ever be able to visit.
His introduction too, is charming. He explains that his first inkling of things Antarctica was when, as a quaking schoolboy in Dunedin, he would wait for a caning outside the staffroom, where one of the few paintings in the school hung. It was a cheap print of ‘a hunched figure, bent almost horizontal against a howling blizzard’. It was Oates, the self-sacrificing member of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition.
The New Zealand Listener: Review of “‘White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica’. 19 December 2008.
“Listed in the Listener’s 100 Best Books of 2008.”
“Sydney brings to photography and Antarctica the same sublime sense of composition with which he paints Central Otago. He had planned to paint Antarctica too, working from his usual pencil studies gathered in the field – “but quickly realised that the dry, icy atmosphere would make sitting still with fingers exposed a virtual impossibility”. We may yet see paintings worked from these images, but in the meantime Sydney takes his place in a photographic lineage that dates back to early exploration team members Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, to who he pays tribute in a long, thoughtful introduction.”