Immersed in Stone: Black Ice is a photo book comprised of photographs Line Løkken made while dwelling with the disappearing glaciers of Jotunheimen National Park. That the artist was an unwitting accomplice to the photographs’ creation is paramount — the immersed experience of the author in a rock and ice landscape yielded a “silent bodily knowledge.” Photographs were made without normal, conscious intention. Subsequent review revealed that a physical imprint had been recorded — a phenomenological engagement with precarious terrain.

Within Immersed in Stone, Nature is not an object. Framed rectangular landscapes are destroyed, releasing a full-spread chaos where Nature remains a verb. The photo book provides the viewer a more truthful — immersive — seeing, realizing Løkken’s original goal, “not only to see the landscape, but to be in it, or in one with it.”

This work may first appear as a statement, a visualization of disappearing glaciers. But the assumptions you bring to the viewing are quickly disarmed by a physicality that triggers senses beyond the gaze. We experience rock and ice, punctuated by a descent into glacier-blue water. That you cannot tell how you ended up submerged — did we fall? — is precisely the point. This falling feels as inevitable as birth — violent, raw, and somehow beautiful.

Calling Immersed in Stone a statement is like calling a birth a meeting — concluding the book, the viewer bears a far closer relationship to the artist, sharing an experience of our collective slipping, falling that is at once timely, now, and yet utterly primordial.

Text by Ethan Rafal