The Lure of the Far North

Marianthi Lainas

In common with many people who have lived their lives in close proximity to the sea, I experience a slight sense of claustrophobia when inland for more than a few days - a strange feeling that something isn’t quite right in my world - and I am drawn back to the coast.

My home, at the North West tip of the Wirral, is a stone’s throw from the beach. Each day I look out over wide, expansive sands towards the horizon and feel the wind blowing in across the Irish Sea from northern lands. Late autumn and winter herald the arrival of tens of thousands of migratory birds, the sandbanks and mudflats of the Dee Estuary offering a temporary pit stop on their remarkable journeys south. Travelling vast distances from their summer breeding grounds in Northern Scotland, Iceland and Greenland, their lines of flight connect me to those distant places.

It is the littoral landscape that inspires me photographically and which I feel compelled to explore visually - dynamic areas of coastline encompassing dune systems, the intertidal zone and the nearshore parts of the sea, a place where tides wash over layers of rock laid down through the millennia, and sands are re-sculpted daily by wind and water.

In recent years I have been making my way further and further north, seeking out other seaward-facing communities, feeling a strong need to experience and photograph their coastal edges. And so, in September 2017, and after many months of planning, I arrive in Ilulissat, a small town in Western Greenland, at 70 degrees north and 200 miles above the Arctic Circle.

I have long wished to visit the world’s largest non-continental island; 80% of this vast country is covered in ancient inland ice, an area of around 650,000 square miles, and Greenlanders, all 56,000 of them, spend their lives looking out to sea, forced to live at the rocky edges of the land, a huge, uninhabitable interior at their backs.

This arctic edge-land is a place of high contrast - barren rocks juxtaposed against expanses of white ice, sunlit icebergs on a matt black sea - a landscape of few mid-tones and challenging to photograph. Accessibility is an issue; with no connecting roads between settlements travel is only possible by plane, boat or dog sled. If exploring on foot there are few marked trails and the frequent sea fogs are disorientating.

Each day I sail out with local fishermen to photograph the ice from the vantage point of the sea, grappling with the practical issues of making images from a moving boat and in waters that are not always comfortably calm. I am also challenged by the difficulty of trying to interpret unfamiliar landscapes in a short period of time and in a meaningful way. Over the years, I have found that it can help to read a lot about a place before travelling, and in the months that precede my trip ‘Arctic Dreams’ by Barry

Lopez and Gretel Ehrlich’s ‘This Cold Heaven’ are my constant companions. Lopez’s book in particular is a classic - his descriptions of wild landscapes are sublime and I am sure that they have influenced my own perceptions of the ice. To my eye, the icebergs are indeed, as Lopez observes, ‘creatures of pale light’, and I choose to emphasise whiteness and empty spaces in some of my images, symbolic perhaps of a fragile environment that may disappear.