To the ends of the earth
Any photograph can tell a story, any portrait can portray an emotion. To convey an emotion in an empty landscape however, is an art few have mastered quite as well as Murray Fredericks. Here he speaks to Armani Nimerawi about his latest project, Greenland.
Murray Fredericks’ penchant for pursuing spaces has taken him to the ends of the earth, literally. In his latest project, Greenland, Fredericks builds on his already impressive exploration of empty places, vast spaces and the nebulous Zen of nothingness. The project, shot over four years, included six visits to Greenland’s inhospitable ice sheets. The result is a haunting, atmospheric and often abstract series of void landscapes that prickle the skin and cannot fail to move.
The inspiration
For his first major project, Salt, Fredericks captured the seemingly desolate landscape of Australia’s lowest point, Lake Eyre. What was initially intended to be one solo visit quickly turned into two, three and so on, until Fredericks had made the pilgrimage an incredible 16 times over eight years. The product was enough work to sustain 20 exhibitions, not to mention numerous time-lapse projects and his first documentary film.
Immediately following the completion of his first, Fredericks embarked on his second major project, Greenland. Though the hot and dry salt pans of Lake Eyre would, to most, seem like a world away from the sub-zero ice caps of Greenland, Fredericks’ projects are underpinned by the same pursuit. “I actually had a vision of what an image could look like and I wondered if it was possible to represent an emotional quality through this idea of a blank image, or this idea of space,” he says. “So I started pursuing landscapes that were as empty as you can imagine.”
Hearts and minds
Throughout his career, Fredericks has displayed an enviable ability to articulate the rationale behind his work, though it would be a mistake to assume that makes him more intellect than sentiment. “The thing that ultimately drives me is a very deep emotion, or a very deep subconscious drive that’s in pursuit of something, and I’m not sure what it is at this stage,” he says. “However, photography and art also requires some sort of delivery, some form of communication. That’s where the thought comes in. I narrow down this idea of a concept before I go out to create a framework that the series is going to sit within, and I think that helps communication, particularly in the art world.”
Fredericks views the development of a project’s conceptual framework as a crucial part of his preparation. “It’s almost like framing a shot,” he says. “You can point your camera at anything, but you’ve got to somehow narrow that down and I try to do that in advance.” Though Fredericks does a lot of research as part of this mental preparation, he admits inspiration can come from literally anywhere.
Into the void
As one might expect of projects that require surviving in some of the most isolated and desolate places on earth, Fredericks has faced his fair share of danger, though perhaps none as perilous as those he faced during the Greenland project.
Fredericks had to endure a multitude of challenges right from his very first foray onto the ice sheets. “You’re not allowed on the ice cap alone, yet I didn’t have the budget to employ someone to be with me on that first trip, and I didn’t realise how important that was,” he says. “Because I’d already worked alone, I contacted someone who knew a loop hole in the law where, if you were under 150 kilometres into the ice cap you didn’t need a permit, therefore they didn’t need to know you were on your own. They didn’t even need to know you were there.”
Fredericks’ contact, a man he considered to be an expert at working in Greenland, did indeed get him within 150 kilometres, just outside the permit zone. Unfortunately, Fredericks would learn too late that he’d just been left in one of the most deadly zones on the ice cap. “That’s where everyone actually dies, as they get caught in the storm because of the katabatic winds, which are zero on top of the ice cap and can get up to 300 kilometres an hour, which is category five hurricane,” says Fredericks.
To make matters worse, Fredericks had only one night of training under his belt (which was mostly discussion), having missed the three days he was supposed to receive after being snowed in at an Icelandic airport. “So I got thrown into this mess and I just never recovered from it. I couldn’t even dig snow yet I went straight into a situation where I had to just basically dig to survive. I couldn’t sleep because the wind was burying the tent under snow, so I had to constantly get out and dig in the middle of the night, in the black.”
As if the risk of being buried in an icy tomb wasn’t enough, Fredericks soon received a call informing him that polar bears had been sighted in his vicinity. It’s the sort of situation that would terrify even the most lionhearted among us, and Fredericks isn’t above admitting he was scared, though he describes it as “a low-speed scare”. “There’s no one moment where it’s like someone is pointing a gun at you,” he explains. “It’s a really low-speed, annoying scared where you just can’t relax.”
Indeed, just a few days in, Fredericks admits he wanted out. “I’d planned to be there for 36 days and on day two and three I wanted to leave. It was a constant battle in my own mind. I had just spent so much money and had so much riding on coming back with something.”
Just as Fredericks thought he’d reached his breaking point, he got news that the polar bear threat had subsided and managed to convince himself to keep going. Of course, it was at this moment that the final blow of Fredericks’ first trip was dealt. “I then lost all my power. My generator got so much snow into it that it froze and I couldn’t get it going, and my big car battery died and I couldn’t get it going with solar. So that was it,” he finishes simply. “I was actually a bit relieved. I thought I’ve got a reason to leave now.”
Despite what most would term a somewhat traumatic experience, Fredericks managed to learn from his initial mistakes and ventured another five times onto the ice sheets. “The lesson out of that was that I had to work with someone else up there. And once I started doing that, that changed everything. I was able to concentrate on the shoot,” he says. “What I also didn’t realise was that what I flown into was as bad as it gets. If you first experience that, you think the whole time is going to be that.”
After surviving an experience like that, many would find their subsequent projects pursued ideas of escalating ambition and danger. Fredericks, however, is adamant that his projects will always be about the pursuit of an idea, rather than the stalking of adrenaline, however he does admit that his surviving extreme conditions has reset his parameters for working to some degree. “I just did a massive job for the BBC’s natural history unit on lightening and the monsoon storms. I had a crew of six and we were running around the Northern Territory during the build up to Christmas. The lightning expert wouldn’t get out of the car and we were just out there running around with the lightning bolts dropping around us. It kind of teaches you to be calm in those sorts of situations.”
Films
Fredericks’ projects have also had the happy and completely unexpected consequence of expanding the parameters of his work to include the field of documentary making. The first film was shot after a suggestion from Fredericks’ supervisor, who was overseeing him during the completion of his Master of Fine Art, which he obtained from the University of New South Wales’ College of Fine Arts. “She said get a video camera from the store and go out and record a bit of what you’re doing [at Lake Eyre] so we can all see, for your assessment.”
When Fredericks returned and showed his footage to a director-friend, the response was overwhelmingly positive. “Something which to me had become so familiar, to other people was so rare and unusual. It got passed on to a few people including a documentary film maker who saw it and said, ‘there’s a film here, it’s going to be in cinemas, it’s going to be on TV!’ I just thought ‘Oh shit,’” Fredericks laughs. “I somehow signed a paper and he went off to people and came back and had a budget and all of a sudden we had to deliver it in two years so it could be screened at the Adelaide film festival.”
From such serendipitous beginnings, big things grew, and the finished product, SALT, would go on to garner international acclaim. Produced and directed by Michael Angus, with Fredericks credited for cinematography, SALT was screened overseas and awarded a number of international awards, including the CameraImage Film Festival’s Golden Frog for Best Cinematography in a documentary, the Jury Prize at Silverdocs/AFI/Discovery Channel, IDA Best Documentary Short, Best Australian Short Film at Melbourne International Film Festival and was also nominated for two AFI Awards. There were even Oscar whispers at one stage.
Fast forward a few years, and Fredericks and Argus were once again embarking on a documentary project, this time documenting Fredericks’ Greenland project. “Nothing on Earth was a completely different kind of film. That didn’t happen by accident. In some ways, the struggle of that film was dealing with the expectation that was built up after the success of SALT, as well as the struggle with the photographic work.”
For Fredericks, incorporating the documentary making into his projects is as much as strategic choice as it is artistic. Filmed in partnership with the ABC, Screen Australia and the Pacific Film and Television Commission, the budget for Nothing on Earth was much bigger than SALT and it allowed Fredericks the freedom to pursue his vision on a much larger scale. “For me, it was a way of fronting and facilitating the actual project in this incredibly expensive location,” says Fredericks, who also channelled his wage from the documentary right back into time on the ice cap.
The addition of commercial assignments that compliment his main profession as a photo artist have always been welcome. “There is always that question of how you give yourself permission to actually go and do these things and that became more complex as I got older and ended up with a family,” he says. “I’ve had to develop my commercial career in parallel to make sure that everything else is looked after.”
Under pressure
Though a wealthy patron may have been an option pursued by artists seeking to support their work in the past, Medici-like benefactors are few and far between these days, and even if they were, it’s not an option Fredericks finds appealing. “You take away your ability to fail. In many ways, that was the pressure that came with having that film there right from the start. I’d come back and the director would ask ‘Where’s the results?’ and I’d have to tell him it hadn’t happened yet. Two times we didn’t even get on to the ice cap and we spent half the budget. We didn’t even get a shot!”
Being stalked by the terrifying spectre of potential failure has stripped many an artist of their courage, for fear that their best work is behind them. When examining Fredericks’ career however, it’s obvious that while he has indeed been tormented by doubts, he has certainly never allowed it to hold him back.
“It was a four year project and two years of that I was pulling my hair out,” he says. “The trips were costing me between $40,000 to $60,000, particularly the earlier ones (I got the price down a little bit towards the end). When the film wasn’t involved – and it was really only involved for one and a half trips and there were six trips in all – I kept having to say to my wife ‘Yes, I’ve got no results, but if we stop now we’ve lost everything’. And that’s what it came down to. I still felt the potential was here, or, more to the point, I felt that it wasn’t a true failure yet.”
This drive to fully exhaust the potential of a project will often see Fredericks revisit a project several times. “I had completed Salt a number of times actually but technology kept changing and opening up new potentials. But now with the Greenland project I’m much, much closer.” In May last year, Fredericks returned to the ice caps and was able to shot from a much more elevated position, due to structure he found in the middle of the ice cap. “I suddenly realised that that landscape photographs a lot better from height. With Salt, the camera was always at about chest height, because if you went up the eye level it ruined the intimacy of the shot and if it went too low it became too graphic. For some reason, when I was up 30 metres off the ground shooting over the ice cap, it all made sense. These subtle differences just keep popping up.”
The future
For the next phase of the Greenland project, Fredericks has shifted his focus to conceptual time-lapse video recorded with a help of a sound recordist in the DYE2 and DYE3 abandoned nuclear missile defence stations located on the ice caps. “It’s funny how your career takes you on a path,” says Fredericks. “These projects, and making the films, and being a stills landscape photographer has meant that I’m in the perfect position to become a time-lapse video specialist, and suddenly I’m working for the natural history unit of the BBC.”
While having the chance to engage in more commercial work has offered Fredericks many exciting opportunities, he has never evaluated the success of his career by a financial standard. “To me, the money equates sustainable projects,” he explains. “If you’re selling, then you can keep going. Ultimately, if I’ve created a memorable photographic series, that’s my personal benchmark. I want to look back, and ideally I’d like people who are interested in photography to look back, and see this solid series of images as hopefully benchmarks in the photographic continuum. That’s what I am aiming for, so that’s what I guess I judge my success on,” he says, “and also, beat myself up about, which is the same thing,” he laughs. In spite of the arctic storms, large fluffy white carnivores and lightning bolts, it seems this intrepid photographer is right on target.