Photographs from the Ends of the Earth
September 13 - December 24, 2007
Koss Gallery

http://mam.org/exhibitions/exhibition_details.aspx?ID=89

Featuring photos and maps from the American Geographical Society Library.

Since its invention in the mid-nineteenth century, photography has
played an invaluable role in the exploration and documentation of
unknown geographical territory—the Earth's polar regions among them.
Many photographers, rather than simply recording the landscape
encountered on these polar expeditions, seized upon the capabilities of
the photograph as an artistic medium to capture the unique visual and
psychological experience of the region. Artists to this day continue to
be inspired by the spare, Arctic and Antarctic landscapes—their
imaginations often set alight by the images of the nineteenth-century
photographers who first ventured there. A selection of these rarely seen
nineteenth-century photographs will be among the works featured in this
fascinating and timely exhibition comprised of approximately 65
photographs and stereographs dating from 1860 to the present day.
Included will be images of the Arctic from the Isaac Israel Hayes
expedition of 1869, Count Wilczek's 1872 Arctic travels, and Robert
Peary's expeditions of 1898-1902, among others, and contemporary
photographs by Subhankar Banerjee, Diane Cook, Rena Bass Forman, John
Holmgren, and Stuart Klipper. These photographs may one day be all that
remain of a region now providing the most extreme evidence of our
rapidly warming climate.

This exhibition was organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum in
collaboration with the American Geographical Society Library of the
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries and curated by Lisa
Hostetler, assistant curator of photographs.