The handmade artist’s book Kilimanjaro : The Last Glacier by Ian van Coller traces a journey the artist took to Tanzania with climate change researchers in 2016. A dormant volcano and the highest mountain in Africa, Mt. Kilimanjaro is home to rare tropical glaciers. Designated by latitude, tropical glaciers are especially susceptible to sunlight and temperature change. Scientists predict most will be gone in the next decade.

Through the Kilimanjaro book van Coller documents the team’s assent. Introductory pages borrow from vintage postcards, referencing the legacy and nostalgia associated with place. Kilimanjaro is a site of primordial mythology and has fascinated popular culture from Hemmingway to Hollywood (The Snows of Kilimanjaro). Van Coller’s book focuses on the landscape and the porters, with inclusions of the team’s climb, campsites, and scientist’s research equipment. Ian van Coller makes paring and sequencing choices that work to harmonize landscape and porters, but also pushe their connection so as to personify place. The ice, the rocks, and the vegetation start to look like the men who also occupy the frames. Indeed, the glaciers seem to come alive, until we consider that we are watching their final days and witnessing a double death. Without the tourism driven by the unique landscape many of these men will be left without a livelihood.

Kilimanjaro : The Last Glacier is a scaled-down version of the monolithic book (37 x 50 in. open) by the same name. The Last Glacier photographs and artist books can be seen at a variety of locations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, US Library of Congress, Yale University, Stanford University, the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley College, Clemson University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This small version of the Kilimanjaro book was conceived as moquette and was initially created by Ian van Coller in a limited edition of 25 to support the binding cost of the extra-large version.