Seasons of Life and Land

When amateur photographer Subhankar Banerjee set out in 2001 to document the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge across four seasons, he could not have known how many hot buttons his project would push. Last year, with Seasons slated for wide exposure through a prominent Smithsonian gallery exhibit and a nationally distributed book, liberal senators wielded Banerjee’s images of a diverse, flowering ANWR to prove that the refuge was not the “flat white nothingness” as described by officials from the Bush administration. Their tactic appears to have worked, since the Senate scuttled oil drilling in ANWR by a 52-48 vote, though not without a lot of heated words and threats of political revenge. The D.C.-dependent Smithsonian may not have had the courage to display such a controversial exhibit in its entirety, but the Science Museum of Minnesota is game. Banerjee has an eye for both science and art: While his wildlife photos are mostly documentary, the photographer’s landscapes capture the silent elegance and haunting gravitas of the intractable wild. The day-by-day diminishing of wide-open spaces in the Lower Forty-Eight only makes our connections to this small piece of Alaska’s vast wilderness—striped with rainbows and aurora borealis, teeming with snow geese, caribou, grizzlies, and loons—that much stronger. 651-221-9444, www.smm.org