"Coal + Ice" photo exhibition at Beijing's Three Shadows gallery

Attention all Beijing denizens:


If you've not had the good fortune to visit this spectacular "Coal + Ice" photographic exhibition at the Three Shadows gallery out in CaoChangDi, you've got just three days left to do so. The exhibition, which juxtaposes a large collection of striking and often heart-rending images of coal mining in China and elsewhere with vast scrolling images of major Himalayan glaciers made a century ago and today, provides frightening evidence of the consequences of carbon-based energy excesses.


The exhibition snakes through three connected chambers of the gallery. The first chamber, dominated by historic and recent still photographs of coal extraction, including some from Cultural Revolution days, is (modestly) heated against the Beijing chill. You then pass through curtains into a huge, long, unlit and unheated chamber with two constantly repeating multimedia presentations running, accompanied by an ominous soundtrack. The first is a presentation is another series of coal extraction images that drive home the human cost of a civilization that is based largely on coal-fired energy. The second presentation is a vast floor-to-ceiling slide show the size of those billboards along the Airport Expressway, with slow reveals of spectacular photographs of glacier valleys made in the late 1800s and early 1900s by mountain adventurers George Mallory, Vittorio Sella and others, followed by images made from exactly the same place by David Breashears. These "before and after" images reveal startling shrinkage of the glacial ice.


Seeing this in a room that is perhaps only a degree or two above freezing enhances the sobering experience. You'll remember this show long after you see it.


A minor footnote: One seed of the exhibition was the gorgeous coffee-table book "Summit : Vittorio Sella : Mountaineer and Photographer : The Years 1879-1909", curated by my friend Paul Kallmes, who had stumbled across the spectacular Sella pictures in an archive and spent all of the 1990s working with the Sella family in Italy to bring them to light, which in turn brought them to Breashears' attention. Watching these images of the great flanks of Everest, K2 and other massifs with their shrinking glacial cloaks engenders enormous respect for these photographers -- for Sella and Mallory for what must have been impossibly difficult feats in making the early images in an age largely predating our flick-of-a-switch coal-empowered society, and for Breashears for having had the idea of replicating these images a century later, the mettle to pull it off, and the determination to bring the consequences of our coal consumption so compellingly to our attention.


Complete list of photographers: Alfredo D'Amato, Bruce Davidson, Builder Levy, Cameron Davidson, Clifford Ross, Daniel Shea, David Breashears, David Hurn, David Seymour, Geng Yunsheng, George Mallory, Gleb Kosorukov, Ian Teh, Jimmy Chin, Jonas Bendikson, Lewis Hine, Major Edward O. Wheeler, Nadav Kander, Niu Guozheng, Robert Capa, Robert Wallis, Song Chao, Stuart Franklin, Thomas Hoepker, Vittorio Sella, W. Eugene Smith, Wang Mianli, Wu Qi, Yang Junpo, Yu Haibo, Yang Shaobin


The exhibition is sponsored by the Asia Society.


http://www.threeshadows.cn/en/index_en.htm
http://sites.asiasociety.org/coalandice/
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/archive-22/


Originally scheduled to run through November, it was extended to 28 December. Don't miss it.

What does this have to do with motorcycles? Probably something.


cheers!