Photographer Alex Krowiak on the Unique Challenge of Documenting Antarctica

The first time I stepped onto the ice of Antarctica, I tried to imagine what it was like for them—the men of the Heroic Age, the early explorers that set sail toward the edge of the known with nothing but their sextants and an unstoppable curiosity.

I thought of Frank Hurley, the Australian behind the lens for the infamous Shackelton expedition and arguably the world’s most famous polar photographer. How he crouched behind his heavy glass plates and early Kodak box camera, capturing the ship Endurance as the ice closed in around her, making images he was never sure would make it home to be developed.

The equipment I take with me as an expedition guide today is infinitely lighter, sharper, and more capable. And yet, standing beneath the same low Antarctic sky, I find myself wondering: how much has really changed?

Because Antarctica itself is still a place that humbles. Glaciers tower above you like silent cathedrals in all directions, their neon interiors exposed where icebergs have calved into the sea. The ocean bursts with life—whales, penguins, and seals by the thousands—just beside a desolate snowy surface. The silence still stretches vast and unbroken—except for wind, the occasional crack of ice, and distant calls of seabirds.

And always, there is the light, so often described as otherworldly. It plays tricks on the mind, bending and reshaping the landscape so that scale and distance collapse into an illusion. To photograph this landscape is to engage in an act of reverence, just as it was for Hurley. The land demands it.

And despite the leap in technology in the time since Hurley, it’s still impossible to properly capture. You raise the camera, and already you are failing. Your lens is too narrow, your sensor too clinical, and your composition too static. Antarctica is a place that resists being pinned down. To even try to photograph it is to grasp the edge of something profound, something elemental, just as it was for Hurley. No matter how advanced my camera, I have never been able to fully capture it.

Of course, to compare my expedition to that of Hurley is kind of absurd. He and his men survived, stranded under the most challenging conditions through multiple Antarctic winters; I went into the field from the comfort of an expedition ship with a sauna and freshly cut watermelon even at 65° S.

Then there is also the matter of change, and what it means to document it. Hurley’s Antarctica was a place of mystery, untouched, impenetrable, and unknown. My Antarctica, on the other hand, we know to be an ecosystem at threat. The ice he photographed, the very floes his ship was caught in, are shrinking. The great ice shelves here are receding faster than those anywhere else in the world. The penguins are shifting their rookeries. Where Hurley sought to show the unknown, we now have to attempt to capture that which we know: evidence of loss.

This knowledge changes the way I frame my shots. I am not just capturing light and form, but time. Trying to document what might soon vanish. I find myself drawn to the fragility of it all: the delicate curve of a berg breaking apart, the groups of feeding whales that have migrated thousands of miles for the krill that is decreasing as temperatures rise and as looming fishing vessels ravage the ocean. Even as I marvel at the grandeur, there is an undercurrent of uncertainty. I do not simply want to show Antarctica as it is. I want people to understand what it is becoming.

And so I press the shutter, knowing that this moment will never come again. That the ice before me may be gone next year. That in a hundred years, another photographer may stand in this place and wonder, as I do now, what has changed. That no photo will ever truly capture the scale of the land or the loss. But still, as Hurley did before me, I try. Because in the end, photography is an act of bearing witness. And Antarctica, in all its otherworldly beauty, is still a story worth telling.