Greenland - John Eide

In June of 2022, nine of us chartered a 76 foot schooner and spent two weeks sailing along the west Greenland shore, in the area around Ilulissat. That part of Greenland has the largest glaciers and calves the biggest bergs.

I was not that interested in photographing more icebergs since I felt I had done a rather good job of it in Antarctica. (See Antarctica, above.) However, I quickly saw that the landscape was far different than the landscape in Antarctica. It was softer, lower, smoother. The ice was less dramatic and the bergs older.

Initially, I became very interested in the relationship between the ice and the land. Then on a long passage between islands, I became fascinated by the relationship between the water, the ice and the dark sky. I started to see these relationships as a metaphor for the profound changes that are occurring.

There was chaos on the water with the mass of growlers and bergy bits. I concentrated on that chaos, in combination with the dark sky, to create metaphors for the profound changes in the climate, especially in the high latitudes, north and south. We were hearing about and seeing the evidence of these changes while aboard.

While the Antarctica images are only slightly adjusted, mostly for color balance, the Greenland images are much more adjusted to make them dark, ominous, scarry, foreboding, to enhance that metaphor of chaos occurring in our climate.