KEY POINTS:
Antarctica is treated by the science community as a giant laboratory. For Anne Noble, it's also a laboratory, where she can explore ideas about photography and the way it is viewed.
"As a photographer and an artist I am interested not so much in re-photographing what we have seen before but asking questions about the ideas everyone has about Antarctica," she says.
"So few people get to go there, but people have images in their minds about the place through photography."
Noble, professor of photography at Massey University and director of research at Massey's College of Creative Arts, has been to the ice twice.
On her first trip in 2002 as an Antarctic Arts Fellow, she set out to photograph whiteness, a project sparked by the Erebus disaster.
"It arose from thinking about how people went to see the landscape, and the plane was in Antarctic conditions, so everyone got disoriented and the plane flew into a mountain. The moment before, passengers were at the window taking pictures."
While those people may have been looking for the grand and magnificent and beautiful, what they were seeing were layers of whiteness.
Noble wonders whether there may be a world of images in that whiteness. "What I enjoy about whiteout as a photo project is it is all about surface and the experience of something invisible."
The white-out project is still incomplete. Noble feels she will need another trip to get enough usable images, and next time is aiming all the way for the South Pole.
But good art, like good science, does not stop with the artist patting herself on the back for the initial idea. In exploring and testing that idea, other ideas will emerge, reality may intrude, the initial premise may prove flawed or weak.
Noble says the show at Two Rooms asks a question: "What is the source of the images we expect to find, if we ever get to Antarctica?"
As in earlier series, such as her pictures of the Wanganui River, Noble is interested in how we come to feel we know a place through a photograph.
After her first trip, she sought out museum exhibits and Antarctic discovery centres, places where an imaginary landscape was created.
"What is real? What is imaginary? What is the object of desire? The work is my process of raising those sorts of questions," Noble says.
"When I went to the museums, I pretended I was in Antarctica taking landscape photos. When I went back to Antarctica [on Chilean cruise ship the Akademic Ioffe in 2005] I remembered my own photos, and rephotographed them."
Whether taken in the Discovery Museum in Dundee, the Christchurch Antarctic Centre or Deception Island on the Antarctic Peninsula, Noble's pictures evoke a kind of frozen clarity, blue-white light coming from within the ice or the polystyrene, whether from diffused sunlight or halogen spotlights.
Humans and their machines are clearly out of place. No one belongs in this landscape.
In the process of creating an idea of place, Noble has to overcome some powerful antecedents. Antarctic photography started with the photographers who accompanied the early explorers, Herbert Ponting with Robert Falcon Scott and Frank Hurley with Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton.
Their images were allied to the culture of their times, documenting the drama of human beings pitting themselves against extremes, the ships trapped in ice, men doggedly pushing on in the face of the blizzard.
The photography was conceived as part of the funding and promotion of the exhibitions, and Ponting in particular worked on many of his images subsequently, inserting dramatic skies to bring them in line with European ideas of the romantic and picturesque.
Which brings Noble back to her ideas on whiteness and of pushing the images towards the abstract, so they become more question than answer. She says she is trying to stop seeing what she expects.
"If you expect to find something, you are blind. If you are open, photography allows you to create with that first encounter."
