After years spent traversing the deserts, forests, and mountains of the American West, New York-born photographer David Benjamin Sherry has turned his gaze toward one of the planet’s most remote frontiers: Antarctica — a landscape both majestic and fragile. The journey, undertaken in 2024, gave rise to a body of images as vibrant as they are unsettling: vast icebergs tinted in pink, orange, or emerald green, suspended in an almost unreal silence. This series, still on view at London’s Huxley-Parlour Gallery, is titled “The Waves”.
Known for his use of large-format cameras and hand-printed analog color processes, Sherry continues his exploration of the landscape’s memory and of our responsibility toward it. His gallerist notes that Sherry “employs analog techniques at a time of growing digital manipulation, seeking to preserve and reanimate the photographic tradition.” Far from nostalgia or technical fetishism, his commitment to film is a form of resistance. “I need to feel the material, the slowness, the chemistry,” he says. “It’s my way of staying connected to the physical world, to light itself.”
Working in extreme conditions — cold, humidity, the unpredictability of the elements — Sherry turned his expedition into a meditative experience. His photographs, both contemplative and vibrant, oscillate between romantic homage and ecological reflection. In photographs such as Transformer or Sleeping Deliverance, immense blocks of ice, sculpted by wind and sea, seem at once eternal and on the verge of vanishing. The artist speaks of “the strange coexistence of beauty and destruction,” seeing in it a metaphor for humanity’s fraught relationship with the planet.
The intense colors that bathe his prints are not digital manipulations but the result of darkroom craftsmanship, where light becomes a tangible material. His saturated hues — electric pinks, acidic blues, golden yellows — blur perception and unsettle our sense of the real. Antarctica becomes an interior landscape, a site of memory, reverie, and vertigo. “For me, color functions as emotion,” Sherry explains. “It expresses the experience of presence, of time passing, and the intimate connection between people and the landscape.”
The images are suffused with light and stillness — a beauty that feels almost otherworldly. Without artifice or commentary, they offer a quiet call: to look, to feel, and perhaps, to protect.
“The Waves,” by David Benjamin Sherry, is on view at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London, through October 18, 2025.
