2010

"I was shooting in an area where Nature is still intact as it always was - there are no paths, no people or buildings. This beauty comes at a price and it came in the tough treks across rugged terrain of tundra moorland, difficult rock passes and crossings of many rivers by melting glaciers, one of which I almost left my bones at the bottom. I was moving along the fringes of the Greenland ice cap, whose melting causes warm storms (called FOEHN) that exist only there and in Antarctica - one of these hurricanes met me on the sixth day and seriously damaged my otherwise tried and tested tent, the next 2 months passed in its regular repair and I often found shelter under rocks. In the first 7 weeks I was only with people in one place for a few days under amazing bigwall climbing rocks. During the second month I had no real idea what was going on in the World, I only sent one way satellite messages with my position to my loved ones, I never met anyone in this 1500 square kilometre area separated by a huge river and fjord without a single inhabitant. I'll never forget the first time I saw and spoke to another human after all this time, it was shortly after the first snow and first northern lights of the summer - one expects to see a polar bear rather than another two-legged creature.

These days it's hard to find a place where few or no (as in this case) landscapers have worked and being free of clichés was worth any effort. The months in the wild were a truly memorable hike for me, but perhaps the most interesting and enriching experience came in the last week when I photographed the life of an Eskimo village. A century and a half ago, the entire population of Tasiusak starved to death in a single harsh winter, no one willing to settle there for 70 years. Today the village is home to 83 inhabitants, isolated between 12 small glaciers and a fjord on the only fertile (for Greenland) land around, in fact it is the first settlement in the World since the North Pole along the length of the island's ice cap. The people there live in extreme conditions half the year isolated but never complaining, on the contrary they are happy with little, no one complains and every day they go out and contemplate the mountains around with a smile, many have said to me "I couldn't live anywhere else without this peace and beauty around". No foreigner had lived in the village before, but after the first two days the barriers were down and everyone was opening their world to my lens. I was overwhelmed by these people and after 8 days I left the village with a promise to myself to return one day. I left on the 4th of September by boat and helicopter transfer to the airport in the north and took the last flight of the season from southern Greenland to Europe."