Antarctica & South Georgia

I had long wanted to reach Antarctica, and when the opportunity finally came, nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it. The silence is what strikes you first. Not an absence of sound exactly, but a vast, weighted quiet broken only by calving glaciers and the calls of thousands of penguins. It's overwhelming in the truest sense.

South Georgia was, for me, the emotional heart of the trip. Standing among 200,000 king penguins at St Andrews Bay, with the old rusted remnants of Grytviken's whaling station just miles away, the place holds beauty and tragedy in equal measure. I lay flat on frozen ground for hours to photograph at eye level with the birds. Worth every frozen limb!

These photographs represent something deeply personal. The ice, the wildlife, the bittersweet history of South Georgia. I came home to Cork a changed photographer, and I think the images show why.