For Earth Month, we’re harking back to some of the environmentally-conscious luminaries we’ve interviewed over the years. The first is Jamie Hawkesworth. From Mission’s Sustainability issue.
Jamie Hawkesworth stands in the world as one of the most important photographers of his generation. He has a unique perspective offered to a few—the ability to capture intimacy with his subject through his innate empathy. It extends to his work, whether he is shooting Kate Moss for the cover of British Vogue, producing books on portraits of people around the British Isles, or working on his current book, To the Antarctic. It lends itself to the values of existing in the moment, unplanned, but the result is completely unique to his images and a talent developed over years.
Raised in Suffolk, U.K. Hawkesworth was formally educated at the University of Central Lancashire in humble Preston. As a Lancastrian, it was immediately of interest to me see how this environment affected his process and if it laid a foundation for his work. He cites Preston Bus Station as a place that established his roots in the medium. I personally sat there many times as a child, and it is clear how the effects of the light in that particular space have influenced his work. Golden hour at the station is completely unique because of the way the light interplays, and the effect is endemic to this location.] Looking at his work for the fashion house Loewe, for example, this aesthetic quality is obvious. “I really learned how to talk to people in that space and also to just be observant and to look at the details of what people were wearing, the way that they were standing,” he says. “It’s such a transitional space; you constantly had people moving through it. So, it was just the perfect place to sit and watch people. The whole place became like a magnifying glass.” Hawkesworth’s first published work, a book titled Preston Bus Station, would come to encapsulate this perspective.
To The Antarctic originated as an editorial photographic series that the Wall Street Journal commissioned Hawkesworth to do. After whittling down hundreds of photographs to a series of 10 for print, what would become To The Antarctic lay dormant in an archive for a few years. The Antarctic project eventually came to completion out of necessity after Hawkesworth finished his previous published project, The British Isles, a book of portraits from around the U.K. He was at a loss when he thought about having to print a photograph of another face, he tells me: “I couldn’t print another person because I just printed 600 photographs of people. So, I said, right, what should I print next? I know, I’ll just print icebergs because it will give me a nice break from printing faces. That’s how the book came about.”
He was armed with his Pentax 67 and a 75mm and a 105mm lens; shooting on film is representative of his ethos in photography. You must lay down your digital arms and place faith in the moment that you captured the image. But how are the two weapons in Hawkesworth’s arsenal, fashion and documentary photography, different? He explains, ‘“It’s just a case of being observant and looking. And then things pop out, whether it’s an iceberg or Kate Moss or a kid in a bus station. So it’s all quite similar.”
The challenges of shooting an almost exclusively white canvas differs from fashion photography, where everything is planned in minute detail. For Hawkeworth, the challenge was not necessarily one of capturing a final image; instead, it was during the printing stage. “Still now, they’re not perfect,” he says. “But I’ve just embraced it. It was incredibly difficult to print. But there’s charm in that because you get really weird greens and blues and all sorts of strange colors going on. There’s a particular series in the book that’s like a foldout, and it’s, like, four icebergs that I shot at midnight. The colors are odd. So, in that sense, it was really brilliant but an absolute nightmare to print the book.”
The book came about from a 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Chris Jones about the commercialization of Antarctica that deeply affected Hawkesworth. The first business-class flight to Antarctica was offered in 2014 and marketed as a day trip, and now tourism in the Antarctic is unhindered. This caught Hawkesworth off-guard. The Antarctic desert has historically been viewed as a pristine wilderness, with the only access granted to research teams or naturalists like Sir David Attenborough. One of the last untouched vestiges of nature is seemingly slipping away year on year., “It was like a people-going-on-holiday kind of vibe,” says Hawkesworth “So it was quite an eye-opening experience in that sense. There are people ranging from 11 years old all the way up to 80 years old, and you can do different stuff depending on your abilities. So, if you want to go to sleep on the ice, you can, and if you don’t want to stay on the boat and instead you want to go on a hike for two days, you can. It’s a very weird experience in that sense. To be honest, it wasn’t the sort of thing that I wanted to do; I wasn’t inspired to document that.”
What Hawkesworth did document, however, is meaningful and a representation of Antarctica in that moment, a precious moment and a moment that could be lost in as little as 100 years. By this I mean the ability to document this landscape safely, as Hawkesworth has. For example, a 2022 article in Eos.org states: “Disappearing ice shelves may lead to the formation of tall, unstable ice cliffs at the grounding line. Calving from these ice cliffs may then cause rapid ice sheet retreat by a process called marine ice cliff instability.” In other words, climate change could render explorative trips like Jamie’s unviable for future populations if global temperatures hit or exceed two degrees Celsius.
The element of hindsight prevalent in this work interplays with what could be a finite amount of time to complete a trip like Hawkesworth has. If current ecological issues are allowed to evolve with no intervention, whether it be government policy or social action, it will ultimately counter the quixotic course, resulting in a problematic ecological conclusion for humanity at large. Climate change is already felt by around 13 million people per year across the globe, according to a recent U.N. statistic, and that number is expected to increase year on year. And climate change is already encroaching on Antarctic systems. The photographic series reflects Hawkesworth’s childlike, innocent curiosity about the Antarctic, drawing us back to a time when the Antarctic was void of scientific fact surrounding climate change. This sense of wonder is replicated throughout the photographic series, even down to the embossed cover, which is meant to evoke a youthful, tactile fascination. “I wanted [the book] to feel a little bit as a kid might if they picked it up, even the font on the front,” says Hawkesworth. “It’s a bit like an adventure in a kind of childish way because, when I look at that project now, it’s like the sort of thing that you dream about doing when you’re a kid. Massive going to Antarctica!”
It is a tentative, even sensitive stage of humanity we exist in. Crisis seems abundant, yet the climate crisis can be argued as the most immediate crisis as it does not reflect a difference of ideals; it will come to affect us all. How we manage this crisis is a conversation of our time. will this collection of images provide humanity with a legacy of past ecological systems and climate functions? Or will it come to define a moment where humanity evolved with crisis to a point of avoidance? Time will tell, but what the work does offer is a unique perspective of a moment in time—a time on the precipice of disaster. How will future generations reflect on this work: with avarice or with gratefulness for the current generation’s actions against a looming disaster? The photographs stand alone as a legacy from an artist capturing the moment, we exist in. How this outlook is to be sustained is ultimately a question of our time and one that needs immediate action.
