David Burdeny’s Mercators Projection: A Tabular Iceberg in the Weddell Sea

Pale sky, a sheer white wall of ice, silvery water and a block of deep shadow: Canadian photographer David Burdeny’s Mercators Projection, Antarctica, 2007 turns one enormous iceberg into four clean fields of tone. He made the picture in the Weddell Sea during a 2007 voyage to Antarctica, and it remains one of the best-known images from his North/South series.

David Burdeny, architect and photographer

Burdeny was born in Winnipeg in 1968 and made his first black-and-white print at the age of 12 in a makeshift darkroom. He went on to study at the University of Winnipeg, earning a Bachelor of Interior Design in 1993 and a Master of Architecture a few years later, and he has continued to work as an architect alongside his photography.

That training shows. His pictures are built from horizons, edges and planes, and he often uses long exposures of two to three minutes in low light, an approach influenced by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Water smooths out, clouds soften and the remaining shapes read almost like architecture. You can see more of his work on his website.

The North/South series: Greenland, Antarctica and Iceland

The North/South series grew out of trips to the polar seas between 2006 and 2008, with later additions from Iceland in 2013. Burdeny photographed from small boats and Zodiacs supplied by expedition companies, the same craft that carry ordinary visitors ashore.

The Antarctic pictures from 2007 carry titles that read like a voyage log: Tabulars in Hope Bay, Five Icebergs, Weddell Sea, Sloped, Antarctic Sound and Giant Tabular Iceberg in Fog. The Greenland frames include Ilulissat Icefjord and Disko Bay. When the series opened at Vancouver’s Jennifer Kostuik Gallery on 11 September 2008, it was shown as twelve chromogenic prints, eleven of them panoramas.

How the four-part composition works

The upper right is the iceberg’s face, a nearly vertical wall that drops straight to the waterline. Open sky fills the upper left. Below, the sea runs the full width of the frame: bright and textured where small waves catch the light on the left, dark on the right where the berg throws its shadow across the water.

The waterline and the edge of that shadow form a cross, and the cross is what gives the picture its map-like order and its title. Gerardus Mercator’s famous projection lays the globe onto a grid of straight lines; Burdeny finds a similar grid in a natural scene.

Look closer and the neatness breaks down in a good way. The ice face is ridged and uneven, the sea is restless and the sky carries soft gradations. There is also no boat, bird or person to give a sense of scale, which leaves the eye free to read the iceberg as pure shape.

Tabular icebergs of the Weddell Sea

The flat-topped, steep-sided berg in the photograph is a tabular iceberg. These are typical of Antarctica, where they break away from the floating ice shelves fringing the continent, such as the Ross and Filchner–Ronne ice shelves. By definition they are more than five times as long as they are high, and they include the largest icebergs ever recorded: one sighted in 1956 measured about 335 by 97 kilometres. Greenland’s glaciers, by contrast, tend to produce more irregular, pinnacled bergs.

The Weddell Sea itself covers about 2.8 million square kilometres between the Antarctic Peninsula and Coats Land. It is named after the Scottish sailor James Weddell, who entered it in 1823, and its heavy pack ice famously trapped and crushed Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance in 1915. The Antarctic Sound, at the tip of the peninsula, is known as Iceberg Alley because so many bergs drift through it.

NOAA’s introduction to icebergs sets the formal threshold: a floating piece of glacier or shelf ice counts as an iceberg when it rises more than about 5 metres above the sea and is 30 to 50 metres thick. Most of its mass therefore sits below the surface, out of sight even in a picture as revealing as this one.

More ice photography and further reading

For a sense of scale that Burdeny deliberately leaves out, compare the 2017 Ferryland iceberg photographs, where houses along the Newfoundland shore make the berg’s size obvious. For ice above and below the waterline, see Steve Mandel’s photographs above and below the surface.

Light on frozen surfaces is also the theme of Kristina Makeeva's Lake Baikal photographs, while the historic negatives recovered at Scott's Cape Evans hut show a century-old Antarctic photographic record. And on a broader note, Thinking Humanity explains why we should respect the earth we live in.

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