©Maria Finitzo, Exhibition Catalogue Cover

Maria Finitzo , photographic artist, filmmaker, and writer, reignites photographs made in 1993 on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The images from her project Ice & Light, remained unseen for three decades before being rediscovered. What began as an encounter with the monumental scale and beauty of glacial ice has taken on new meaning as the Arctic landscape has undergone profound transformation. The photographs now exist simultaneously as documents of a place and elegies for what is disappearing. Printed in platinum/palladium, they bring together the endurance of the photographic object with the impermanence of the world it depicts. Inspired in part by Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, the work considers photography as an instrument of memory—capable of preserving a moment even as the landscape itself continues to change.

Finitzo opens the exhibition, Ice & Light, at Perspective Gallery in Evanston, Illinois on September 3^rd and runs through the end of the month. The opening reception is on September 12^th from 5-7pm with an in-person Artist Talk on Thursday September 17^th, from 7-9pm.

A conversation with the artist follows.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (1)

Maria Finitzo is a photographic artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Chicago, Illinois. She was a long–time associate of the three time Oscar nominated Kartemquin Films. Her filmmaking career spanned over thirty years and resulted in a body of work that won every major broadcast award including the George Foster Peabody Award, three times and the Alfred E duPont Award. Her films were screened in festivals and theaters around the world.

In 2020, after completing her final film, THE DILEMMA OF DESIRE, which premiered at SXSW, and went on to screen in over 80 festivals worldwide. she returned to photography, an early love, to explore the power of visual narratives.

Finitzo’s photography arises from a deeply imagined place. Her work is inspired by the Italian author Italo Calvino who believed that the imagination was the identity of the world’s soul. He found his proof in his writing: she finds hers in images. Inspiration can be a feeling, a narrative seeped in enchantment, the human body at play, ancient mythology, dreams, a childhood memory, a family album.

Her photography work has been exhibited at The Chicago Civic Center, PhotoPlace Gallery, A Smith Gallery, Filter Photo, Photoverse, Photo SC, Perspective Gallery, Nobechi Creative, Center for Photographic Art, and New Orleans Photo Alliance. She was an APA Los Angeles Off the Clock–2025 Winner. Finitzo is a member of Perspective Gallery in Evanston, Illinois.

Instagram: @finitzo.photographic_artist

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (2)

Ice & Light

Ice & Light revisits a body of photographs made in 1993 on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic, one of the most remote and rapidly changing landscapes on earth. Working with a Hasselblad camera, I sought to capture the scale and presence of glacial ice—monumental formations that calve into fjords and drift as icebergs across the northern seas.

Unresolved at the time of their making, the original color transparencies were set aside for three decades before being rediscovered. Their return underscores both the material endurance of analog photography and the fragility of the subjects depicted. The ice shelves of northern Ellesmere Island, among the oldest in the Northern Hemisphere, have since undergone significant loss due to climate change, rendering these images a record of a landscape in disappearance.

The project engages photography’s relationship to time, memory, and impermanence. Echoing Alfred Stieglitz’s notion of “equivalents,” the images function not only as documents but as meditations on transience and transformation. Printed in platinum/palladium, a process chosen for its tonal depth and archival stability, the works emphasize both the physicality of the photographic object and the enduring resonance of what has been lost.

The exhibit is inspired by Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, written by the naturalist Barry Lopez.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (3)

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography…

I grew up in an Italian family on the south side of Chicago. My father built houses and my mother became a gourmet cook. I read a lot, listened to Italian opera and studied ballet, though I was never very good.  At some point, I found myself interested in taking family pictures. I was an avid consumer of LIFE and LOOK Magazine. When I was in college my father gave me a Leica camera from Germany that his best friend had given him after World War 2. No one, in the family, including my father could figure out how to use it, so he gave it to me. The summer in between high school and college I spent hours in Central Camera store on Wabash Ave in Chicago trying to learn how to use the camera, starting with how to simply load the film. I owe my career to the guys behind the counter. Their patience was infinite.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (4)

You made these photographs in 1993, but they remained unresolved for nearly thirty years. What was it about returning to these negatives now that made you feel the work was ready to be seen?

When I returned home from Ellesmere Island in 1993 I had a few of the images made into color prints. Maybe dye transfer prints, I don’t remember now, but I was never happy with how they looked. I put them away in a drawer, forgot about them and for the next 30 years made documentary films and raised my children. During the quiet of the pandemic, I found them again, and for the first time really looked at the images, and remembered why I had gone to the top of the world and what it had felt like to be in the high Arctic. Maybe it was the reality of global warming, or I was just finally ready to see what I had captured, but I knew they belonged in the world.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (5)

How has your understanding of the photographs changed since you first made them? Do you see something different in the images now than you did three decades ago?

I had grown up admiring the photographs of Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Paul Caponigro, Ansel Adams, Ernest Haas, Imogene Cunningham, to name only a few, but I was I think too distracted by filmmaking to really settle in to the art of photography. When I found the icebergs again, I’d already decided that I’d done what I could as a filmmaker and it was time to move on. Looking at the images, I saw what they could become and so I started researching different archival process for printing them.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (6)

The Arctic landscape you photographed has changed dramatically. How does knowing what has happened to Ellesmere Island affect the way you look at these photographs today?

Everything about how the Arctic landscape has changed breaks my heart. Global warming wasn’t new in 1993. Scientists had been warning the world for decades. Yet it always seemed to be a problem for another day. I found these images during the days of loss, that is the way I think about the pandemic, and when I look at them, loss is what I feel. The images are a historical record of something that no longer exists and if we don’t turn things around all photographs will be nothing more than a record of the missing.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (7)

Why was platinum/palladium the appropriate process for this body of work? Does the permanence and physical presence of the prints become part of the meaning of the photographs?

Images made from the platinum/palladium process are very beautiful and after researching different processes I decided it was the one that that would reveal the depth and tonal range of the icebergs. How a work is presented in the world always enriches the work. It felt right to use a historical process for images that are now part of a historical record.

There is something especially poignant about an analog photograph becoming a record of a landscape that no longer exists in quite the same way. What does the physical photographic object allow us to hold onto that memory alone cannot?

Memory is unreliable and I suppose one could argue, so are photographs. But a good photograph elicits an emotion in anyone who sees the photograph. Having a physical print of that photograph, gives me something I can touch and feel and share with others who have never been to Ellesmere Island, hopefully inspire the same sense of awe and wonder I felt the first time I saw icebergs.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (8)

The photographs were made with a Hasselblad, a deliberate and relatively slow way of working. How did the physical process of photographing in such a remote and extreme environment shape the images?

Yes, it’s a very slow process, but everything about Ellesmere Island is a slow process. It takes many days of travel to get there and return home, even more if the weather is bad. Flowers only have a three-week season to grow, so they never get very big, but they are beautiful nonetheless.

Because there are no trees on Ellesmere Island, you can see for miles in any direction and the expanse of landscape before you creates an illusion that time has slowed down, which in fact it has, the day lasts 24 hours. Working slowly with a Hasselblad camera felt exactly right on Ellesmere Island, philosophically and practically. Anytime you are in a remote wilderness area it’s best to move and work carefully and slowly. Mistakes are made when you rush. Mistakes that might even include falling into the icy fjord with or without the camera.

Do you think of Ice & Light primarily as a document of a changing landscape, a meditation on impermanence, or something more personal—a meditation on your own relationship to time, memory, and change?

I think of the photographs as all three. Walker Evans considered photographs as transcendent documents. He believed a photograph could possess specific content that captured a moment in time with cultural resonance that at the same time transcended that moment to evoke a state of mind. These images are deeply personal to me. They represent my own private passage of time and a reckoning of all that has been lost. But I also believe that the goal of photography and filmmaking is to create something that transcends the personal to evoke a deeper meaning and resonance beyond the boundaries of my own life.

©Maria Finitzo, Iceberg (9)

Tell us about your upcoming exhibition!

This is the first public exhibition of Ice & Light, which is inspired by Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, written by the naturalist Barry Lopez. I’ve paired the nine images with quotes from Arctic Dreams. The exhibit opens at PERSPECTIVE GALLERY in Evanston, Illinois on September 3^rd and runs through the end of the month. The opening reception is on September 12^th from 5-7pm with an in-person Artist Talk on Thursday September 17^th, from 7-9pm.