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May 18, 2010
This is the kind of photography I will never do: wilderness photography in very remote wild places with a large format 8″ x 10″ camera. It is far too difficult and expensive for someone in my position to be able to do.
Olaf Becker's earlier Broken Line series was based on photographs of the coast of Greenland. 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. Can you imagine doing that around Antarctica? It's not feasible.
Becker's Broken Line photographs of icebergs, rock cliffs, scattered settlements, and the ocean waters that crash against it, were taken at night by midsummer light, with a large-format camera and exposures of up to several minutes. They are more than pretty/beautiful pictures of icebergs since the work explores the relationship humans have to nature.
Above Zero, Becker's second book, collects the photographs of the interior of the island made in trips in the summers of 2007 and 2008 the Arctic explorer Georg Sichelschmidt.
Olaf Otto Becker, INLANDEIS 5, 08/2008, from Above Zero
The purpose of this photographic trip was to photograph a series of remote rivers that indicate how global warming is weakening Greenland's ice sheet and hastening its disintegration.
Olaf Otto Becker, River 1, 07/2007, Position 4, from Above Zero
Of the first river he photographed, in July 2007 Becker writes in his Above Zero book:
At the time we were there, this river was seven and a half kilometers long and supplied by innumerable meltwater streams and rills. Lining its banks were millions of cylindrical holes full of water. On closer scrutiny, they turned out to contain black dust and soot that, having absorbed the warmth of the sun much faster than the reflective ice had, sunk through the ice, creating cylindrical holes. Far away from the coast and surrounded by inland ice, the fast-flowing river suddenly disappeared into a moulin [a glacial hole that can be hundreds of feet deep]. When approaching the moulin, we heard the ice creaking loudly beneath our feet, the meltwater having presumably carved huge cavities underneath the ice sheet, which here is about 700 meters thick.
This is an endangered landscape that is changing before our very eyes due to global warming.
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Olaf Otto Becker's first book was Under the Nordic Lights ----color photographs of Iceland taken at night during the late 1990s.