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Terra Nova: The Earth Record

Liam Man

In an era of accelerating environmental change, Terranova serves as both a visual testimony to the beauty of the planet and a record of their shifting state. Illuminated with aerial lighting rigs, each landscape is resculpted with light and shadow, carefully positioned to enhance the unique features of each location.

By presenting familiar environments in an unfamiliar light, the project challenges perceptions and confronts the gap between our knowledge of the natural world and our lived connection to it. We understand more about the Earth than at any point in history, yet our relationship with it grows increasingly abstract and detached.

Terranova invites us to close this distance, to look again with fresh eyes, and to reignite the adventurous curiosity that first connected us to the natural world.

Petrification

Rock formations carry a beauty that lies not only in their scale and form but in the history they embody. Every cliff, mountain, and rocky outcrop is the product of immense forces and endless time. Their surfaces hold the marks of wind, water, ice, and even mankind’s influence, inscribing a record of change that is both violent and delicate. Seen together, these formations are monuments of endurance. They are reminders of the planet’s capacity to shape itself, and evidence of the fragile balance between permanence and transformation.

Carcass of the Ice Beast

In 2009, thermally reflective blankets were used to cover a large portion of the once-mighty Rhone Glacier, home to Europe's largest man-made ice cave. Intended to slow the glacier's retreat, 15 years later and the battle is lost. The coverings have deteriorated, hanging in tattered shreds over the last blocks of ice, like the torn skin of a colossal, dying beast.

This series is both a testament to admirable yet ultimately futile local efforts, but also a reminder that climate change cannot be overcome on a local level and requires global unified coordination.

Last Light

In October 2024, an expedition was conducted to photograph a solar eclipse from the surface of a glacier. This ambitious project took Liam and his team to the Glacier Leones, a giant river of ice bordering the Northern Patagonian Ice Field. Here, they would not only witness one of nature’s most spectacular astronomical events, but also evidence of the glacier’s recent struggles. One of the fastest retreating glaciers in the world, the Glacier Leones is a dying landscape. By the time an eclipse passes this exact location, there may not be any ice left.

Entombed in Ice

As glaciers reach their terminus in Iceland’s frozen landscape, they calve icebergs into glacial lagoons. These lagoons form where meltwater collects in valley floors, freezing solid under extreme winter temperatures and locking the icebergs in place. After a sudden downpour, the frozen surface was briefly flooded with rainwater, transforming the ice into a vast mirror that reflected the surrounding landscape. The scene was surreal, as if the lagoon itself had become a window into another world.