Jessie Wender:

On the last day of 2012, the photographer Magda Biernat-Webster and her husband, the illustrator Ian Webster, began a journey in Chile that they’re calling North via South: from Antarctica to Alaska. After landing in Santiago, Chile, via New York City via Williamsburg, they drove fifteen hundred miles south, through Chile, to catch a cruise boat headed to Antarctica, which will be the official starting point of their voyage. Over the coming months, we’ll be following their journey and publishing dispatches from road, boat, and plane.

Click-through for a selection of Magda’s photographs from Chile, with captions from the couple: http://nyr.kr/WefYVR

(Source: newyorker.com)

Bipolar: Scott Sternbach at the Earth’s Extremes

In 2008, the photographer Scott Sternbach travelled to the world’s southern extreme to create “Antarctic Souls,” a project that focussed on the thirty-odd researchers, biologists, cooks, pilots, and boat captains who are involved in a federal project to study the effects of global warming on the region. Sternbach, who currently serves as the director of photography at LaGuardia Community College, has long dreamed of visiting the far north as well. He recently got his chance thanks to a grant from CUNY, which sent him to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in Alaska, where he spent eight weeks photographing one of the state’s last living tribes, the Neetsaii Gwich’in.

- Click through to read about Sternbach’s experience, and for more photographs from his time among the Neetsaii Gwich’in: http://nyr.kr/tSXoTz