© Dillon Marsh | 7.06 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on Naradu glacier every minute
Surreal Ice globes
Dillon Marsh
The visualization of the volume of melting ice
Words by
Artdoc
This year, 2020, besides being the year of the pandemic crisis, is on course to be the warmest since records began in the 19th century. The poles are heating up, causing icebergs to melt, and glaciers are melting down at a rapid pace. Can we ever visualize the volume of this melting ice? Very probably not, as it is likely beyond our imagination. South-African photographer, Dillon Marsh, has found a sophisticated solution to make us visually aware of the size of melting ice. He uses CGI, computer-generated images, to visualize the melting glaciers in India and Nepal in his project, Counting the Costs. His aim, he says, is “to create work that offers people a new perspective so that they can come to clearer conclusions.”
The original photographs of the urban environments in India and Nepal have a quotidian and natural look. In one photo, we see a typical downtown busy Nepali street with electrical cables, a pumpkin stall on the right-hand side and a grocery stall on the left. Central in the picture, amid a pile of rubbish, a more than two meters high blue ball dominates the scene, giving it a surreal and extraterrestrial atmosphere. The ball measures 7.06 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost, every minute, on Naradu glacier in Himachal Pradesh. The blue ice spheres, created with CGI, which Marsh interweaves with his images with the help of Photoshop, become, in a magical way, exceptionally credible.
On his choice to use the CGI generated spheres, March says, “There are several reasons why I chose to represent the volumes as spheres. The sphere is the most compact volumetric shape, having the lowest area-to-volume ratio. It is a familiar shape, but has an intriguing surrealistic quality to it when made large. It also echoes the shape of our planet, drawing our attention to the fact that this is a global problem.”
The sphere echoes the shape of our planet.
Marsh compiled data from scientific reports to calculate the rate at which certain glaciers are losing mass. Of his work, he says, “Using CGI, I have created accurately-scaled ice models and placed them within typical human environments. The aim is to draw attention to the dramatic climate changes that continue unabated while we go about our day-to-day lives.”
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CGI
The use of CGI has been developed mainly in the advertisement industry. Hyper-realistic images are used to create ‘eye-catching visual masterpieces’, to convince of their stopping power. CGI images are cost-saving, and much faster than the making of traditional photographic images. The audience of such advertisements may not be aware of the computerized fabricated images with which they are seduced into buying the products these advertisements promote. Still, the veracity is not often a highly-debated issue, whereas in documentary or photojournalistic work this would be seen as highly misleading, and is officially banned by awards such as the World Press Photo. This all is a non-issue for photo artist Marsh. He combines his digital photographs with images made by the computer software Maya. “I have used medium and large format analogue cameras in the past,” he says, “but due to the high cost of film, I exclusively shoot with a digital camera now. I don’t use any special add-on gear; all my effects are done in post-production. I use Autodesk Maya to create the models with their detailed textures, reflections and transparency. I then paste the rendered models into my photos in Photoshop, using several techniques to ensure that the size of the model is accurate according to my research. A lot more tweaking follows as I try to make the model look like it’s realistically part of the scene.”
Marsh merges these photographic images with 3D-images in Photoshop, in which he tries to make his images as convincing and natural as possible, unhindered by old-school opinions about documentary photography. “The style of my photos is usually natural and uncomplicated. With my composition, I’m generally trying to create visuals that are balanced, interesting, but relatively placid. The rendered model is usually the focus, but the scenery around it is evenly filled with things to draw the eye. I don’t go overboard with my processing, either, preferring to keep things looking fairly natural.”
His inspiration comes from the great masters in environmental photography, combined with science-fiction. “I’m inspired by photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Richard Misrach, who have both done fantastic projects about our relationship with the environment. I am also a huge fan of speculative science fiction books, many of which provide imaginative predictions of our future relationship with the planet we live on.”
Climate Change
The project, Counting the Costs, is not the first in which Marsh had used CGI imagery. An earlier work, in which there are spheres of gold and platinum, copper and diamonds, the CGI objects represent scale models of the materials removed from the ground.
My aim is to create work that offers people a new perspective.
“Ever since I began working as a photographic artist, I’ve been drawn to topics centred around the relationship between humans and the environment. A few years ago, I took this a step further by incorporating computer-generated imagery into my photos to reveal aspects of this relationship that couldn’t be shown with photography alone. I first used this technique to document the mining industry of South Africa. In the resulting series called For What It’s Worth, I used GCI to represent the total volumes of copper, gold, diamonds and platinum group metals concerning the ground from which they were extracted. In 2019, I turned my focus to climate change and the rapid loss of glacial ice we’ve been experiencing for decades. For my series, Counting the Costs, I represented the rate at which glaciers are shrinking by placing accurately scaled CGI ice spheres into street scene photos I took while on a trip through India and Nepal.”
Despite his personal concerns about climate change, Marsh defines himself as an artist. “Although I am concerned with how poorly we treat our planet, I don’t personally want to be an environmental activist. My aim is to create work that offers people a new perspective, so that they can come to clearer conclusions. My home city of Cape Town has only recently escaped a several-year drought, and even though it is hard to ascertain the exact influence climate change on this situation, it is clear that similar weather anomalies will become more frequent.”
It is not uncommon that documentary photography is deeply intermingled with politics. Most photographers have a political urge or sense in the background of their work, mixing the aesthetics of the images with social and political concern. But that doesn’t mean that the artists are themselves politically active or want their photographs to be interpreted as such. This is true for Dillon Marsh as well. His main target is increasing awareness in his audience. “I avoid bringing politics into my work. I don’t want to make certain people or groups think that I’m targeting them as the problem. In essence, we are all complicit; adding politics to the message just muddies the water. I hope that my work reaches a wide and eclectic audience. Politicians and policymakers may well have the power to activate systemic changes. Still, it’s generally the collective will of the average person that determines the direction in which change happens.”
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