Brian Brett
The Yukon News
Friday, November 29, 2002

Imagine gazing into a well of frozen blue water so deep you feel you could fall right into the ice. It’s called a jade iceberg.

A year ago I would have never conceived such depth in a close-up photograph of an iceberg reproduced in a book, but Antarctica is a very different book.

Some time ago, Pat and Rosemarie Keough, neighbors who live just up the hill, on artist-crowded Saltspring Island, asked me to proof the introduction for their new book.

I’ve edited books for close to 30 years, and am often asked to examine people’s texts.

There were a few, minor mistakes I pointed out and they corrected.

Later, told I was acknowledged in the credits, I remember thinking “that’s a thoughtful gesture,” and forgot about it, until I saw the final version of the book.

Every once in a while a book comes along that changes the way we regard books, such as Audubon’s Birds of America, or Edward S. Curtis’ bankrupting stab at immortality. The North American Indian, or the fine printing of William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer.

Antarctica strives to achieve that rarefied summit.

With a wry smile, leafing through its pages, I thought, how pleasant to know my name is in a book that will become legend.

Pat and Rosemarie Keough, photographers and authors, began their project five years ago.
Already renowned for their best-selling Ottawa Valley Portfolio and The Nahanni Portfolio, they decided to challenge the way art books are created, and create a series of fine-print limited editions of photographic books of endangered and rare places.

Antarctica is the first of that series.

They spent close to two years on the frozen continent and its surrounding seas, taking close-up photographs of leopard seals that chewed on the propeller of their boat, or sitting still for hours, waiting for one of thousands of emperor penguins to waddle up and have a looks.

There are rules about animal encounters in the Antarctic these days.

You need the patience to wait for them to approach you. You can’t chase them any more.

These photographs prove that a wise policy for an endangered place can still yield magnificent results.

Conditions could be rough, dangerous, and sometimes ludicrous.

Occasionally, they had to trek with their tripods over their heads to protect themselves from attacks by a very aggressive bird, the skua.

More scarily, Rosemarie got caught temporarily in a blinding blizzard, comforted only by the penguins surrounding her.

The weather was so cold it was impossible to load film in the filed most days. They would have to load three different cameras each for a shoot.

When they returned to camp, they had to brush their cameras clean because the fine snow invaded the mechanism.

The rewards are impressive: 330 spectacular images in this thick, 28-pound, wide-format book with Morocco leather covers, each copy fitted into a handmade linen box.

Images as diverse as dead seals and the haunting interior of a whaler’s shack, now home to a seal pup, are cleverly sequenced to tell a visual story of the landscape and its inhabitants.

Startling photographs leap off the page: snow multi-colored by algae; a flock of tourists resembling fluffy red birds; an abandoned whaling station beach growing a crop of rusted ship propellers and enormous albatross handing among clouds like kites in a storm.

The ice and iceberg images are interesting for several reasons. Most photographers know how difficult it is to capture snow scenes, especially close up.

The Keoughs have daringly used the grain of their film to help create depth. It’s an artistic decision that some might question, but not when faced with the superb reproductions in this volume.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about the reproductions is the 10-micron stochastic dot printing technology.

This new printing technique, used here for the first time in a book, dwarves the industry standard of photographic reproduction.

These pictures are so finely reproduced that the film’s grain is more visible than the dot of the printing, allowing Antarctica to reproduce the Keoughs’ delicate exposures, and incidentally, win the “Benny” (the Benjamin Franklin Award for the world’s best printing this year).

Every detail from hand binding to the use of the fine leather from semi-wild Indian goats that have been despoiling the local ecology has been taken into account.

Great books must be obsessive and this is an obsessive book. I found myself smiling at the madness of it as I turned the acid-free pages.

Although the economic risks have been absorbed by the Keoughs through their own long-running publishing house, Nahanni Productions (www.keough-art.com), the profits from Antarctica are devoted to BirdLife International and their Save the Albatross campaign.

(Prince Charles, a BirdLife supporter, hosted the official unveiling of Antarctica in England.)

Today, 17of 18 albatross species are endangered, predominantly due to the birds being accidentally hooked and drowned while attempting to snatch bait from the longlines of fishing vessels.

A cheap deflector can be used to scare them away, or a chute to direct the lines out of reach underwater.

In fact, it’s been proven there’s more profit (less time loss) in using these techniques for reducing seabird mortality.

Only the laziness of the fishermen is exterminating these magnificent birds.

Antarctica has been printed in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, each selling for $4,500 – a lot of money, but Antarctica is a lot of book.

The authors decided they won’t create a trade edition, because that would betray both the reproductive quality of the images, as well as the integrity and special nature of the limited edition.

That puts it out of reach for all except wealthier book lovers. Hopefully, enough Canadian libraries and museums and specialized institutions will buy copies so that the gnarl public will have a chance to peruse it.

The curious thing about art is that we always assume great work takes place somewhere else – that it’s ‘out there.’ Yet, sometimes, it is just up the hill.