Simon Norfolk’s haunting series, Shroud, is on view at the Belfast Photo Festival, which closes June 30, 2021.
Made in collaboration with Klaus Thymann of Project Pressure, “a charity with a mission to visualize climate change,” Norfolk’s photographs depict efforts to enshroud and save part of the Rhône Glacier in Switzerland. Known as a tourist attraction, and featuring a man-made ice grotto, the glacier has been covered in blankets to forestall further melting. Norfolk and Thymann collaborated on a unique helium balloon to light the glacier’s covering, resulting in images that evoke the iconography of lamentation as a means to represent climate change.
“When I touched the glacier, I felt like I was touching a huge dying beast, one that was just fading away under the heat of my palm against it. I felt responsibility, too. The most important thing about my work is that it’s beautiful because that’s the seduction that draws you in. It’s a journey that I want to take the viewer on by drawing them in with a beautiful image, but one that tells a very different story on closer inspection.” -Simon Norfolk
Read a recent article published in Creative Review about this series here.