Susan Seubert, Brown Bluff, Iceberg #8, Antarctica, November 2023, 2024. Wet plate collodion ambrotype, 4 × 5 in, variable edition of 5

A Record of a Slow Death

by Hailey Cook
ed. by Amelia Rina
May 16, 2026

Susan Seubert’s Fragile Beauty features dozens of photographs of polar ice captured over a decade. The earliest stills show icy leviathans lying in restless, vast oceans. Some have jagged blades that extend upwards to pierce the flesh of an unsuspecting sky, while others have sharp, seamless corners like walls of stone. At their base, a choppy sea swaddles their weight, its waves licking their wounds and steadily swallowing them whole. Seubert began taking regular arctic expeditions by 2014, visiting places like Antarctica, Alaska, Greenland, and Canada. When she began photographing polar ice in these regions, she was unaware that she had begun documenting the climate disaster. Between 2014 and 2024, Seubert watched beloved icebergs dissolve into saltwater, shrinking under the weight of warming temperatures.

Susan Seubert, *Iceberg #1, Cierva Cove, Antarctica, December 2015*, 2024. Wet plate collodion ambrotype, 5 × 4 in, variable edition of 5

Seubert took some of her earliest photographs with a Kodak Instamatic. Released in the 1960s, the Instamatic model was among the first affordable point-and-shoot cameras. It was a small, handheld metal box that could be fitted with a color or black-and-white film cartridge. At the time, anyone could pick up the little camera and capture scenes, from mundane to fantastic, and later see the final picture once it was developed in a darkroom. But gone are the days of the shadowy still image materialized on a roll of plastic. Now, just about everyone has a digital camera on their person in their phones, allowing them to point and press to produce a complete photograph in a fraction of a second.

For much of Seubert’s Fragile Beauty series, she denied the convenience of modern technology, adopting a nineteenth-century technique reminiscent of photography’s infancy, called ambrotype. This technique produces images on glass using a large-format camera. To make an ambrotype, a glass plate is coated with a special solution called collodion and soaked in a bath of silver nitrate. Then, while the plate is still wet, it’s placed into the camera and exposed to light to capture the image on glass. The final image is black-and-white, with a dreamlike, hazy filter.

The black-and-white gradient reduces each mound of ice to texture: serrated edges, rounded corners, delicate ripples, and glimmering sheens. In the absence of color, the viewer may not even immediately recognize what they see. Seubert chose the ambrotype in part because of its historical implications, which reflect the passage of time displayed across the series, demonstrating “the historical context of polar exploration and how that ties into climate change.” Additionally, by stripping the polar landscapes of their bright blues, pine greens, deep grays, and foamy whites, Seubert directs attention to the sheer scale, texture, and intimate detail of each mass. The ambrotypes are just four by five inches, about the size of an average postcard. Their size and limited chromatic range force the viewer to notice each detail at close range.

Susan Seubert, *Icebergs at Ilulissat Icefjord #1, Greenland, July 2024*, 2024. Wet plate collodion ambrotype, 4 × 5 in, variable edition of 5

About half a dozen larger, contemporary color prints, taken with a digital camera, stand in stark contrast with the ambrotypes they dwarf. The vivid images are striking for their bright, iridescent glacial blues, dark ocean water, and deep green arctic vegetation. The color prints ground the series in the present, while a distant, almost mythic reality is represented in the ambrotype images.

“There's a lot of information you can get about ice itself, by looking at the color. Whereas, with the ambrotypes, you are looking at the shape and then context,” Seubert said. Together, the distinct techniques blur the boundary between past and present. This juxtaposition asks the viewer to consider how long humanity has borne witness to climate disaster, while pointing to how quickly climate change has accelerated the collapse of polar ice.

Susan Seubert, *Cracked Fast Ice, Svalbard, 2017*, 2024. Pigment print mounted on dibond, 40 × 60 in

Seubert attended Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, where she earned a degree in photography. She says that much of her photography relates to themes of social responsibility and environmental issues; in her early career, she gained recognition as a photojournalist covering heavy topics like domestic violence and grief. In the late ’90s, her nature photography gained traction when a photograph of the Oregon Coast made the front page of The New York Times. By 2004, she’d landed her dream job at National Geographic. The gig eventually allowed her to embark on regular expeditions to arctic regions, where she started to realize the ever-changing, malleable nature of the polar ice she photographed. Over time, she saw cathedrals of ice transform into dull hills floating like ghost ships in the sea.

“I had the benefit of going over and over to the same places,” Seubert said. “When you visit all these places over time, you really start to witness the change that happens.”

Seubert’s portraits of vanishing ice are awe-inspiring and terrifying. The horror lies in the remoteness and solitude of each iceberg, and in knowing these floating creatures are disappearing at alarming rates, some being photographed for the last time.

Susan Seubert, *Iceberg Alley, Antarctica, 2015,* 2025. Pigment print mounted on dibond, 40 × 60 in

When Seubert looks at the Fragile Beauty series, she grieves for the loss of polar ice.

“These glaciers are essentially starving, and so it's just like anything that you see starving, you want to help it,” Seubert said.

Despite her grief, Seubert doesn’t want the viewer to feel discouraged. She holds onto hope herself, believing that beauty can be a catalyst.

“There's a lot to be said for climate anxiety, but that doesn't really help anybody,” Seubert said. “By making the pictures really beautiful, and something that you want to look at, it makes you turn toward them and not away — and turn toward your climate anxieties, and face them and say, ‘What can I do?’”

Photos like those in Fragile Beauty, which capture rare, breathtaking natural wonders, have the power to spark awareness, attention, and empathy. In this way, Fragile Beauty presents not only a record of a slow death, but a call to action, asking humans to reconsider our relationship with nature, and what we can do, together, in community with one another.

Hailey Cook is a writer and photojournalist from Anchorage, Alaska. She recently graduated from Oregon State University with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and works as a reporter in Salem, Oregon.