Marzena Pogorzaly

Go south, young woman (the independent)

Marzena Pogorzaly's photographs reveal the terrible beauty of Antarctica. She tells Kevin Jackson how she was bitten by the polar bug

It's hard to believe such forms exist in nature. Some of them seem to have been carved or moulded or sliced into vast, abstract sculptures, round and gravid as a Henry Moore, skinny and precarious as a Giacometti, blockish and brutal as a set of Carl Andre's expensive bricks. Others seem more two-dimensional and painterly - swirling white abstracts against a sheer black background. And even the ones that do seem natural don't look as if they belong in this neighbourhood of the galaxy - more like postcards from another star system. read more

Openings: Portents from a frozen continent (FT)

For the British there are two great Antarctic photographers: Frank Hurley, who travelled south with Ernest Shackleton, and Herbert Ponting, who travelled with Robert Scott. Hurley’s photograph of the Endurance as a magnesium flare-lit ghost ship gripped by the ice, and Ponting’s of a black Terra Nova framed in the aperture of a luminous ice grotto, are as much part of the nation’s iconography as JMW Turner’s “The Fighting Temeraire”. read more