In 1999, the German photographer Olaf Otto Becker took a picture of a glacier in Iceland for his first book, Under the Nordic Light. When he returned to photograph the same glacier three years later, it was gone.
More recently, Becker has been photographing Greenland, whose rapidly melting ice sheet is among the urgent issues under discussion at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
Between 2003 and 2006, Becker made a series of solo expeditions in an inflatable Zodiac boat along 2,500 miles of the west coast of Greenland. His photographs of this remote North Atlantic shoreline—its icebergs, rock cliffs, scattered settlements, and the ocean waters that crash against it—are collected in his second book, Broken Line. They were taken at night by midsummer light, with a large-format camera and exposures of up to several minutes. Unsentimental and astoundingly beautiful, they show a violently shifting ice-filled landscape at arresting points of stillness. In scale and subject matter, some resemble the sublime landscapes of nineteenth-century painters like Frederic Edwin Church.
In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Becker returned to the west coast of Greenland with the Arctic explorer Georg Sichelschmidt, this time to photograph a series of remote rivers whose traces he had originally spotted in a NASA satellite photograph. No road exists in this region; about a hundred miles northeast of Ilulissat, within the Arctic Circle, it can be reached only by trekking inland from the coast across miles of glacial crevasses and melting ice floes. Becker’s photographs from these expeditions appear in his latest book, Above Zero, and are now on view in exhibitions in New York City and Copenhagen.
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