Travel far enough south across the Southern Ocean through sub-Antarctic regions to Antarctica and you enter a wilderness shaped by extremes. Each surface sculpted by ice and wind, this achingly beautiful, uninhabited and unspoilt area exerts an addictive pull on adventurers and travellers of all types.
Award winning photographer and acclaimed wilderness artist Peter Hall first visited the Antarctic Peninsula in 2001 on a tourist ship for a one-off "trip of a lifetime". Three years and seven cruises later, he found himself completely alone on a black and deserted beach with only a tent, the wind and the birds for company - and seventeen days alone on perhaps the most environmentally and historically fascinating island in Antarctica; the actively volcanic Deception Island.
Experienced through his words, superb images and paintbrush this book offers a unique vision of what is truly the planet's last untouched wilderness area.
Peter Hall’s photographs and paintings certainly cannot be accused of lacking movement, and the author’s use of imagery and poetic language simply serve to emphasise and complement that of the pictures:
“Somewhere high up in a lonely sky, a wisp of cold air collided with maritime moisture and crystallized to form a beautiful, shining star; a fragile, floating snowflake that began to fall silently to what is our coldest and highest continent on the planet”.
The above introduction to the first chapter creates a real sense of beauty and intrigue, and combined with the photograph depicting a similar image on the opposite page, serves to furnish the reader’s mind with enough information to experience the journey around Deception Island for themselves. This style continues throughout the book; no one can possibly know what it is like to be alone in the wilderness of a deserted Antarctic island unless they have been there, but Peter Hall’s adept use of word and picture gives the reader a pretty good idea.
Each of the photographs has been carefully selected to fulfil a task and to show a different aspect of the environment. From the rather comic shot of a group of tentative Adelie penguins making their way back to the water over slippery rocks, to the frantic drama of a mass takeoff of Pintado Petrels, and the majestic grandeur of a looming, ocean-battered iceberg to the tranquil beauty of a mirror-like sea, each photograph tells its own tale and has a distinct character.
Further on towards the end of the book the reader is introduced to Peter Hall’s paintings. These are as striking as the photographic work but as perhaps is to be expected contain much more personal insight from their creator. Where the photographs benefit from a descriptive complementary explanation, the paintings barely need it, which is why Peter Hall has reduced the text to brief captions in the ‘Paintings Gallery’. A few of the paintings are a result of missing a photo opportunity, with Peter having to keep the ‘lost’ image in his head until reaching his studio some weeks later. No matter how expensive the equipment used, photographs can never quite come up to the standard of the image as seen through the human eye, but the paintings do get marginally closer.
