Vanishing World: The Endangered Arctic

Natural History, Dec, 2007 by Laurence A. Marschall

Vanishing World: The Endangered Arctic Photographs by Mireille de la Lez; text by Fredrik Granath (Abrams; $40.00)

Antarctic Fishes illustrations by Boshu Nagase; text by Mitsuo Fukuchi and Harvey J. Marchant (The Johns Hopkins University Press; $45.00)

Mireille de la Lez and Fredrik Granath spent five years at the top of the world, traveling by sledge and snowmobile, tenting in snowdrifts, and keeping a wary eye out for angry polar bears, hidden crevasses, and swiftly advancing blizzards. The photographs that they worked so hard to create are beautifully reproduced here in full color, but they depict a world etched mostly in subtle tones of blue-gray and white. There are intimate close-ups of bears--in repose, jumping through the snow, swimming in watery leads between drifting floes of ice. There are equally detailed portraits of walruses, arctic foxes, whales, and arctic terns. And there are gorgeous landscapes, organic forms sculpted in ice and rock or ice and water. Except for a few paragraphs here and there, none of the pages are captioned, as if the authors relied on the Arctic to speak for itself. And speak it does: these images of barren, rugged terrain and hardy, solitary animals convey an overwhelming sense of the lonely and precarious state of life in the far, far North.

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From the opposite pole of the Earth comes Antarctic Fishes, an illustrated catalog by a polar marine ecologist and an Antarctic biologist of the finned species that swim the southernmost oceans. Readers will want it on their coffee tables, but not as a field guide; few of us will ever encounter a Nichol's lanternfish or a sailfin plunderfish, either in the wild or at the fish market. The book's appeal, rather, is in its illustrations, produced by the unusual Japanese art of gyotaku, or "fish rubbing." In gyotaku (which was developed in the mid-1800s, and so is no more ancient than photography), a thoroughly washed fresh fish--in this case, fresh-frozen for transport from the Antarctic--is covered in clinging, semitransparent tissue paper. Then layers of colored inks are carefully dabbed over the surface using a cotton wad. When the tissue is lifted off and laid flat, a luminously textured, anatomically accurate rendition of the living creature appears. Each of the fifty-four plates in Antarctic Fishes was created by this process, and each print, bearing the calligraphic signature of gyotaku master Boshu Nagase, stands on its own as an elegant and informative work of art.

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LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.