Caleb Cain Marcus

Damaini is proud to present Caleb Cain Marcus’s second monograph,

A Portrait of Ice, a series of color photographs depicting the glaciers of

Patagonia, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and Alaska. The essays are by

curator and critic Marvin Heiferman and Robin Bell, a senior researcher

at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Three of

the images have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While on a trip to Patagonia Caleb Cain Marcus began to think about

the role of a horizon. “As the boat that crossed Lake Argentino swayed

back and forth, I thought about the oppression created by the lack of a

horizon in an urban environment and what would happen if there was

no visible horizon in the open space. What would happen if it vanished?”

To create a successful photograph he believes, “The preconceived line

between the artist’s vision and what the subject resonates blurs until

the influence from artist and subject can no longer be distinguished.”

In his essay Heiferman writes, “How curious that as glaciers around

the world recede, so, too, does the materiality of the photographic

medium in our increasingly digital age. As a result, it’s difficult to look

at photographs from this project, even as we respect and marvel at all

that seems to be so solid, and not feel a simultaneous sense of awe and

nervous anticipation about a future we can barely imagine.”

Heiferman continues, “It is the painterly quality of these stark images, as

much as photographic ones, that makes the work seductive. The woozy

atmospheric conditions that prevail look as if they are air-brushed or

stippled in. Images of crenellated landscapes that evoke the surfaces

of the brain or the moon, give the impression of being dusted with

pigment, like pastels.”

Caleb Cain Marcus’s work is held in the permanent collections of

the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, High

Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography and George Eastman

House, among others. Cain Marcus was born in Colorado and currently

lives and works in New York City.