Jeff Schewe and I have been friends for the better part of 40 years. Jeff and I travelled together to teach photography workshops Antarctica in 2005, 2007 and 2009. But we’ve been friends since the early 1990s after crossing paths at photo trade show and sharing mutual friends, like the late Bruce Fraser. We come from different worlds, Jeff from advertising photography and me more from the landscape world. We share a bond that transcends personality, location and background.

Jeff is an excellant photographer and I featured one of my favorites of his digital creations in my 2006 book Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography. Jeff came out and joined me at the Badlands of South Dakota for one of my digital national parks project trips in 1997. In fact he took the portrait of me Life Magazine used in their profile of me later that year. In more recent years Jeff has concentrated on the photographs he makes for the sheer pleasure of making them. We were together on three Antarctica workshops and have been friends for so long its hard to remember when we were not. Many shared experiences have created a special bond and respect.

Jeff and I differ on many issues about image veracity and photographic truth, but his images are very special and it is my pleasure to feature some of Jeff’s Antarctica work in my gallery.

I was proud to feature this image by Jeff in my 2006 book Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography.

Jeff’s Artist’s Statement

Black and White in Antarctica: Photographs From the Bottom of the Earth

I’ve had the good fortune to have been able to travel to Antarctica three times. Each trip was a trip of a lifetime, and the sheer quantity of photographs I captured (36,029 to be precise) during those trips has made it hard to get a handle on. I’ve got a lot of photographs that were obviously successful, but it really wasn’t until the Covid Pandemic lockdown that I directed my attention towards images I’ve already shot vs planning and traveling to new locations to shoot.

The thing about Antarctica is the light, which is ever changing, and the textures that light produces. There were some photographs who’s light and shapes and texture were vastly more pronounced in B&W than in color. As I started selection editing with B&W in mind, I found many more photographs that literally begged to have the color removed and the light and shadows and textures enhanced. Creating B&W images in the darkroom is how I fell in love with photography in the beginning. While the technology of printing has evolved, there’s still something particularly special about a well-crafted B&W print regardless of whether the print was made in a darkroom or from a computer.

It’s my hope that by exposing viewers to the beauty of the Antarctic landscape that more attention can be drawn to the plight of our planet’s environment. Beyond the beauty of the Antarctic landscape, the vast ice-covered continent is a major component of the Earth’s global climate system. Antarctica contributes to slowing global heating, driving important ocean currents and drawing down millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Over my three trips I encountered substantial change in the glaciers and reduction in the amount of sea ice. Global warming and melting ice sheets are a threat to the wildlife and is very pronounced in Western Antarctica where ice retreat and ice shelf collapses are causing serious impacts to all species of wildlife endemic to Antarctica. Saving the environment isn’t simply to protect the land and animals, it’s critical to the preservation of humanity.

--Jeff Schewe, January, 2025