On a recent afternoon at PDX Contemporary Art, Susan Seubert’s photographs were glowing.

We had met at the gallery at 1 p.m. to see Fragile Beauty, featuring photographs of icebergs presented in two ways. In one room, large-format color pigment prints celebrate these natural wonders in the context of their environments.

The vivid orange and pink hues of summertime’s perennial sky infuse Seubert’s photo “Polar Night, Antarctica, 2015,” while verdantly green Alaskan conifer forests provide the backdrop to “Iceberg, LeConte Glacier, Alaska, 2015,” as if the iceberg has wandered off course. There was also a shot called “A23a Iceberg, Antarctica, 2024,” of the world’s largest iceberg, recently in the news after running aground near the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic.

In the adjacent room, small black-and -white photographs made using the vintage wet-plate collodion ambrotype technique render icebergs and surrounding clouds with striking contrast and moody atmosphere. So many of the icebergs seem architectural, including “Brown Bluff, Iceberg #8, Antarctica, November 2023,” which has an arch going through its center, and “Iceberg #1, Cierva Cove, Antarctica, December 2015,” with enough swoopy curves to resemble the work of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid.

As its name suggests, in Fragile Beauty the wonder is leavened with melancholy: These icebergs have been disappearing before Seubert’s eyes. Amidst escalating climate change, scientists estimate that all the world’s icebergs will be gone by about 2050. Yet it’s not just Seubert’s subject that’s ephemeral. It’s the photos themselves.

After continuing our conversation at a nearby restaurant and then returning to PDX Contemporary Art just after 3 p.m., we were taken aback. Sunlight from the gallery’s clerestory windows was now hitting the ambrotype photos directly, causing not so much a reflection as a kind of radiant bloom.

Wet plate ambrotype photos are printed on glass, almost like slides. To demonstrate this centuries-old technology, as part of Fragile Beauty a sample photo-plate was erected vertically on a small stand, without a frame. As Seubert and I stood there, sunlight hitting the sample was creating projections behind and in front of the glass, rendering its iceberg subject as ghostly apparition.

At the same time, although the framed ambrotype pictures are just 4×5 inches in size, in direct light the icebergs’ basic shapes were discernible from across the spacious room, appearing almost three-dimensional. “It looks like the light is coming from within,” Seubert said.

That Fragile Beauty, which continues at PDX Contemporary Art through March 29, includes both large-format color photographs and small vintage black-and-white shots is also perhaps fitting given Seubert’s parallel career paths. She is an accomplished photojournalist, having traveled the world from equatorial islands to polar ice caps, as well as an esteemed fine-art photographer with 30 years of noteworthy gallery and museum exhibitions.

It’s not just that Seubert’s editorial photography (for National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and many others) rises to the level of art, although that’s true. Since the beginning, she has exhibited in galleries: often delicately crafted studio shots with a strong social conscience, and often utilizing vintage printing techniques.

“I’ve always felt the need to have a creative outlet, because so much of what I do is based on what the publication wants or what an art director wants,” she explained. “And that’s fine. I enjoy it. It’s still a creative process, and there’s still a lot of fun to be had and interesting stuff. But it’s nice to have an area where I’m just free to do whatever I fancy.”

Dreams and Ambition

Though Fragile Beauty’s icebergs make compelling subjects for their sculptural and ephemeral qualities, Seubert’s show also seems to be about the passage of time, not just as the icebergs melt in a time of climate change but also as the photographer reaches a turning point. After a decade of polar excursions, she’s ready to retire from National Geographic Expeditions and all that travel. And just as the majority of an iceberg’s mass is under water, stories from Seubert’s accomplished career kept rising to the surface.

For example, the restaurant we walked to, Emerald Line, turned out to have been both professionally and personally significant. In 1996, Seubert was part of a Portland Institute for Contemporary Art group show in this building, “Pushing Image Paradigms: Conceptual Maneuvers in Recent Photography.” At its opening, Seubert also met her future husband, gallerist and framer Steven Josefsberg (his S.K. Josefsberg Studio operated in the Pearl District from 1993 to 2004).

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Seubert first dreamed of a photography career during family trips to her grandparents’ house, while perusing her grandmother’s collection of yellow-bound National Geographic magazines.

“One day I came across this story about the honey hunters of Nepal. Spread across two pages were two of my greatest phobias: bees and cliffs,” Seubert recalled in a 2018 TEDx talk. “I could spend hours thumbing through the pages of the stacks of magazines in my grandmother’s house in Ohio, dreaming of the exotic places, and it was way back then that little girl thought to herself, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to make a living traveling in the world and take pictures?’”

By sixth grade, she was selling raspberry jam at church to raise money for a school trip to France, where she took pictures with a Kodak Instamatic. In high school, now equipped with a Pentax K-100 reflex camera, Seubert sold her first picture after it was displayed at a café in Indianapolis.

Determined to leave the Midwest after graduation, Seubert remembered another photographic keepsake from her grandmother’s house: an album of photos taken on a cross-country trip to Oregon in a Model-T Ford. That helped steer Seubert’s application to the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Because it was still affiliated with the Portland Art Museum at the time (before going independent in 1994), Seubert’s instructors included Dianne Kornberg and PAM curators like Terry Toedtemeier and John Weber.

Though she thrived in art school, Seubert was still restless and ambitious. In 1991, with Kornberg’s help, she became the first PNCA student accepted into the Alliance of Independent Colleges of Art & Design’s New York Studio Program. With Weber’s help, she began working for the photographer duo Clegg and Guttmann. Through one of Toedtemeier’s connections, she got an internship at the prestigious Magnum Photos in New York City. “It was just this extraordinary experience meeting living legends,” she recalled. “Elliott Erwitt would come in and Eve Arnold would go waltzing by.”

Creative Breakthrough

The months in New York helped Seubert achieve a creative breakthrough back in Portland that led to her securing a gallery show before even graduating from PNCA. She had been volunteering at a women’s shelter, and for her senior-year thesis she initially imagined a photojournalism project about domestic violence. But after being exposed to so many talented photographers’ work in New York, “that just obliterated it,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘The world doesn’t need another journalism project about a women’s shelter. The world needs something different.’”

Seubert began accumulating bits of text from research materials about sexual predators at the shelter where she’d volunteered, “and then I would go out and shoot reportage-style photographs to illustrate it,” she said. Pairing words and images, “I just started playing in the darkroom, and I was really driven.”

As the thesis deadline and her 1992 graduation neared, Seubert would hang silver-gelatin prints from the series out to dry in the third-floor student gallery. One day while she was away, Portland’s most celebrated gallerist of the time, William Jamison (for whom the Pearl District’s Jamison Square is now named) saw Seubert’s images and invited her to his Jamison/Thomas Gallery.

“I took my portfolio, such as it was, and went to show it to him,” she said. “But William was like, ‘I’m on a call. Can you leave it with me?’ About a week or two later, he called me up and said, ‘Can you come to the gallery?’ I just figured I was going to retrieve my work. But he sat me down and said, ‘That is the strongest work I’ve ever seen.’”

In 1993 her first solo show, Every Three Seconds, premiered at Jamison/Thomas. “It wasn’t a huge success in terms of finances, by any stretch,” she added. “But it established me firmly in the Portland art world. And then it just went from there.”

Over the next two years, Seubert’s work was included in two group shows at Jamison/Thomas, as well as the group show “Crosscut” at the Portland Art Museum. But her relationship with Jamison was unfortunately short-lived, because the gallerist died in 1995.

Seubert joined the roster of Froelick Adelhart Gallery (now Froelick Gallery), whose founder, Charles Froelick, had been gallery director at Jamison/Thomas.

For her first exhibit there, Panphobia in 1996, she again paired words and images. Inspired by a long out-of-print encyclopedia of fears, phobias and anxieties, she made studio and field photographs to illustrate various definitions: a Bible (“Hagiophobia”), a ventriloquist’s dummy (“Pediophobia”), a snake (“Ophidiaphobia”) and a naked couple embracing (“Homophobia”). To take the pictures, Seubert used an 8×10 wooden view camera, beginning a long exploration of vintage equipment.

Conspirators, flowers, restrooms

Despite the early success exhibiting with Jamison, Seubert scrambled at first to make a living. She worked as a waitress at Old Town Pizza, in the darkroom at PNCA, and substitute taught. She also worked as an assistant to local photographers, who encouraged her to begin seeking out freelance magazine and newspaper assignments.

In 1994, two years after graduation, she got her big break as a photojournalist, covering the aftermath of the Tonya Harding scandal. Seubert’s courtroom photo of Derrick Smith, one of the conspirators in the 1994 assault of Harding’s fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, was published in Newsweek. “We had to use the AP office to develop the film, edit and then send the pictures over the wire to New York, which literally took all night because of the modem connection,” she remembered.

To Seubert’s surprise, however, it was a photo of a flower that became more influential to her career. In 1999, she won a prestigious Eisenstaedt Award from Columbia University for her Garden Design magazine cover shot of a dahlia.

She’d thought photojournalism meant breaking news, but this award-winning photo, more than the Newsweek shot, “opened the door” to her professional career, Seubert said, “and gave me a better understanding of what I was doing.” As she explained in a 2017 TEDx talk, “It solidified this idea to me that what was central to my work was giving a voice to beauty.” When she returned to New York to receive the award, Seubert discovered that legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz had been nominated in the same category.

That same year came an assignment that caught her parents’ attention: a front-page shot for the Sunday New York Times, featuring Heceta Head on the Oregon Coast. But to pay the bills, Seubert took commissions of all kinds, including a cover shot for PRO magazine, which stands for Portable Restroom Operator.

Vintage techniques, social conscience

Over the ensuing years, Seubert’s fine-art gallery shows became a regular occurrence, at Froelick as well as galleries in Seattle, Houston, Boise and elsewhere. She was also repeatedly included in group shows at museums, including the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, and Salem’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

Here, perhaps as a grittier monochromatic yin to her colorful journalistic yang, Seubert continued to explore black and white photography with a variety of vintage technologies and techniques, including tintype and ambrotype photography. And although her work is eclectic, she has often returned to themes involving either science and nature or the sociopolitical consciousness established in that first Jamison/Thomas show.

2002’s Neurasthenia, for example, a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was a series of surreal portraits made as tintypes (a vintage technique of printing directly onto thin pieces of metal), evoking states of hysteria.

2005’s Memento Mori featured dolls’ and children’s dresses in tintype. 2007’s Iraqi Extraction offered close-up views of teeth extracted from Iraqi prisoners by U.S. Army medics during the first Gulf War. 2008’s Nest was an early use of wet plate collodion ambrotypes that she’d later put to use in Fragile Beauty, here featuring close-up shots of birds’ nests.

In 2017, feeling “profoundly depressed” (as Seubert describes on her website) by the election of President Donald Trump and its attendant rise of “a racist, xenophobic, sexist, bigoted, extreme-right political climate,” she found not just solace but another artistic breakthrough.

For Not A Day Goes By, which debuted at Froelick Gallery, Seubert put out an online call for volunteers willing to be photographed with their heads covered by plastic bags to illustrate asphyxiation (one of the most common means of suicide), in exchange for a free standard portrait. The black and white photos were printed on high-gloss metal. That spring, the series was exhibited at the renowned Venice Biennale. In the 2018 TEDx talk, Seubert called it “the apex moment of my fine art career.”

Becoming bi-polar

Even so, Fragile Beauty may be an equally significant moment for how it marries her photojournalism and fine art, and culminates 10 years of polar exploration.

In 2004 Seubert got the call for what became her dream job. When a National Geographic Traveler editor called her on April 1 of that year, Seubert thought it was a joke. But the magazine was looking for a photographer to shoot a story called “Canada Coast-to-Coast,” traveling across the country. First, though, Seubert had to complete a test job, and was sent to Seattle for a one-day shoot at the Panama Hotel. After passing that test, she traveled to Cortez Island off British Columbia, and kept going until she reached the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. “All of my dreams had come true,” Seubert said in the TEDx talk.

Over the ensuing years, Seubert has traveled all over the world for National Geographic Traveler and other magazines: Australia, Thailand, Ireland and Britain, Caribbean islands such as St. Lucia, Barbados, Curacao and St. Barts, as well as several shoots in Hawaii. Though she worked hard, it was a charmed life traveling to such sunny tropical locales.

Yet Seubert found perhaps even more fulfillment in the opposite kind of climate.

Beginning in 2009, she developed a deeper relationship with National Geographic, becoming one of the organization’s official Photography Experts, which meant traveling with National Geographic Expeditions aboard their ships. In 2014, she began traveling regularly to the poles. As seen in the Fragile Beauty photographs, over the ensuing decade she traveled to frigid northern locales including the Upernavik Fjord in Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago near Norway, and the Jökulsárlón glacial lake in Iceland, as well as numerous locations in or near Antarctica.

“It is absolutely a bucket list thing,” she said. “I mean, I think I’ve been to Antarctica 20 times, and the Drake Passage 40 times. Who would have ever thought this girl from Indiana would ever be going there?”

Coming full circle

Fragile Beauty is Seubert’s first solo show in five years, and a new beginning exhibiting at PDX Contemporary Art after resigning from Froelick Gallery. Seubert emphasizes an easy, natural connection with PDX Contemporary founder Jane Beebe, who like Froelick had worked at Jamison/Thomas. “When she decided to take me on, what really stood out to me was that Jane just rapid-fired nearly every body of work that I have ever made,” Seubert explained. “She knew it, and she responded to it.”

Fragile Beauty also marks the end of an era, for though shooting for National Geographic Expeditions at the poles has been perhaps the greatest highlight in her already-eventful career, after 20 years she’s decided to disembark.

Why stop? Partly it’s logistics. She’s tired of being away from her husband (who faces spinal surgery) and elderly parents for so much of the year, not to mention the grueling multi-day treks to reach these polar locales, the living on a ship for several weeks at a time, working 16-hour days.

And Disney’s ownership of National Geographic (as of 2019) has in some ways changed the company’s culture. But it’s also because seeing the polar ice caps melt, taking countless animals with them, has taken an emotional toll.

Seubert remembers one moment watching a polar bear catch and kill a bearded seal and then climb onto a large floating piece of ice to eat it, but because the temperature was over 70 degrees, the bear could not finish its meal because “(t)he ice melted in front of our eyes,” she said. “So if you go to these places, it’s hard to believe that people come away from these trips not believing that climate change is real and rapid. It’s happening at such an amazing pace.”

Even so, Seubert’s show at PDX Contemporary Art isn’t dour. One senses in these photographs not just the ephemerality of the melting ice-scape but a sense of hope. Though newly inaugurated American leadership has rejected climate-change mitigation measures, the rest of the world is taking action, on scientific/technological fronts with alternative energy and carbon capture as well as artistic efforts to raise awareness. And UNESCO has called attention to Fragile Beauty for the United Nations’ World Water Day and World Glacier Day programming March 21-22. Seubert also recently co-hosted the UNESCO webinar “Frozen Narratives” with glaciologist Dr. M Jackson.

“I think that’s the one thing that I’ve walked away with from these trips. There is still a lot of beauty out there,” she said as we parted. “There’s still a lot of raw power in the earth and the ice: that there’s still time to save it — that we don’t have to be hopeless.”

***

Susan Seubert’s Fragile Beauty continues through March 29 at PDX Contemporary Art, 1881 N.W. Vaughn St., Portland. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays (most days but not consistently until 6 p.m.) or by appointment.