Esther Horvath: Robert C. May Photography Lecture

With the sensibility of a poet and a scientist’s dedication to knowledge, Esther Horvath creates visual stories to reveal the realities of climate change, particularly in the Arctic where scientists predict ice caps could melt completely by 2035. “The only thing that I can really hope is that people will listen,” she says. “That the changes are happening now. This is in our hands now, if we can protect it, or if it is destroyed.” 

Horvath has photographed environmental issues around the world, including efforts to save a nearly extinct species of sea turtles, but she specializes in polar regions. In September 2019, she embarked on a three-and-a-half month journey aboard the Polarstern, an icebreaker carrying an international crew of scientists into the Central Arctic Ocean. She worked in 24-hour darkness with only the ship’s spotlights and moonlight for illumination. Temperatures dipped down to -67 degrees and the crew always had to be on the lookout for polar bears. “I completely, deeply fell in love with the mesmerizing environment,” she says. “Being so disconnected from the rest of the world, that’s the moment I can be there completely in the now.” 

Just a month after returning from the expedition that found The Endurance—the long lost ship of the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton—Horvath was awarded the 2022 International Center of Photography Emerging Artist Infinity Award for raising public awareness of devastating ecological changes in the Arctic. When she isn’t traveling, the Hungarian-born photographer and filmmaker is based in Germany, where she works at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. She is a fellow at the International League of Conservation Photographers and a member of The Explorers Club. 

Her book Into the Arctic Ice provides insight into research of scientists aboard the Polarstern. Her images have also appeared in Audubon Magazine, National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Stern, and Time, among other publications.