During the last ten years, I have done very little photography-related travel. Most of my photography has taken place where I live, in New Zealand. I have a set of locations that I love and keep returning to again and again—I’ve got to know these places.You’d think perhaps that familiarity would lead me to plan the types of images that I hope to create—or that my approach to photographing there might become quite fixed—but the opposite has been true. By really getting to know a place, I’ve heightened my sense of exploration. I revisit these revered landscapes with a completely open mind which enables each visit to present new opportunities for experimentation.

Not since 2012, when I travelled across Africa for a couple of months on a photography trip, have I travelled overseas specifically to take photographs. This insight might seem surprising for a full-time landscape photographer. My travels abroad since then have mostly been without my camera. I’ve chosen to treat these trips as holidays or travel experiences, not as a time to work on my photography. I don’t feel the need to photograph every landscape I visit. I prefer to be more engaged with the landscapes I photograph, taking the time to explore and form a connection; a relationship with the place.

So, when contemplating guiding on an expedition in Antarctica, the location appealed to me greatly. I had always wanted to visit and photograph this unique landscape. But, at the same time, I also felt a sense of hesitation and uncertainty as I didn’t quite know the direction I wanted to take with my photography whilst there. I also could not imagine how the images I would create could fit within existing bodies of work. However, I was excited by the potential to explore an expressive approach in a fresh landscape.

Reflecting back on the trip and the image I made, I have decided this is a landscape I will return to—I feel my work here is not complete. I now understand this environment and how I wish to photograph it—and hopefully, I can make more images to build a portfolio of work from Antarctica. But, perhaps I’ll see the landscape in a very different way, or just start working on a completely new set of images, and the idea I have of extending this body of work will go out the window as I start again from scratch. But this is the thing I love about returning again and again to the same location, it’s the chance to be able to explore it more expressively, to see things you wouldn't and couldn’t have seen the first time, and move away from just representing it to understanding it and being able to express your relationship with the landscape.

journey to south/waves
keep breaking/into the unknown
temperature ever dropping/sea
becomes ice/summer but like winter

blue into grey and black within blue
only white sustains

This world of white on white offers a simplicity that allows complexity to be understood. Is it “complexity within simplicity” or “simplicity within complexity”. Patterns within patterns build to form the greater Antarctic landscape; annually growing and shrinking as the sea ice forms and melts with the seasons. As the sea ice grows, the sea shrinks – as the sea shrinks, the sea ice grows. Everything is connected.

Here the landscape is experienced differently. The cold and silence focus the senses and the mind. There is a sense of conflict, wanting to stop to take time to observe but at the same time there is a sense of urgency to keep moving to warm the body. Antarctica offers a global reference point capturing an ever changing world. The only consistency is change. Change being constant, but not always consistent.