For three months the Sun hibernates below the horizon in Uummannaq, Greenland, 70.4ºN. Arriving late December to visually document sea ice forming then would come with certain logistical challenges…

 

 

For one thing, DSLR camera manufacturers automatically try to make your images look like a nice day in Japan. To change the settings in Manual mode — the hint is in the Latin, manus (hand) — meaning you must stab at a smorgasbord of miniature buttons, knobs and dials with your frozen fingertips. “Did Latin have a word for frostbite?” I wondered as I navigated touch-screens with fingers that have yet to fully recover a month later. And let’s not even talk about how my lips became stuck to metallic parts of the equipment; it was certainly nothing romantic.

I was beginning to think that the reason we don’t see too many films shot during the Polar Night might be that film crews inevitably become stuck to their tripods or boom poles at some point.

 

 

Light posed the most obvious challenge for a lens-based artist. The Arctic night is long and (predictably!) dark, especially when it’s overcast. Lacking much reflective snow cover on Uummannaq’s dark granite, it was only light enough to read outside a couple of hours a day in early January. Not that you would want to read outside.
I had stretched my budget to purchase an 8-year-old Sony A7S before departure. The “S” stood for “sensitive” and it was reputed to have the bee’s knees of low light sensors in its day. It also turned out to be super “sensitive” to cold.  Users in 2014 complained that it overheated but I can report that its battery kept its heat energy about as long as a takeaway pizza in Uummannaq, where the outdoor temperature was 0º to -20ºC … plus windchill.

 

 

Thankfully my flying camera, George, tolerated such extremes; it was only wind gusts around icebergs that really ruffled George’s feathers. But even for him, focus needed to be spot-on; low humidity and clean air can give clear views over 200km in Arctic regions, making everything seem much closer than it really is, but also unhelpfully highlighting even the slightest focus error.

 

 

Finally there was the question of colours or, perhaps more philosophically put: what really is white? The stunning deep blues accompanying several hours of polar twilight on a clear January day in Uummannaq (which sells itself as “Greenland’s sunniest settlement!” by the way) accentuated the already extreme blues in the ice, causing great confusion for the electronic presets. Filmmakers conventionally signify night by adding blue hues to suggest moonlight.  But in the polar night a camera set even for a “shaded daylight” colour temperature of 7000ºK ends up capturing an image so blue that our highly adaptive visual perception — a built-in feature of homo sapiens called “colour constancy” — would later judge the photograph as having an improbably blue colour cast. Indeed after 3 winters in the Arctic, 2 of them involuntarily marooned by border closures (thanks, Australia!) I still sometimes felt like I was living inside one of artist James Turrells “Ganzfield” colour field installations.

 

 

Amidst this mess of subjectivities I was reminded of Laurie Anderson’s recollections as NASA Artist in Residence. One day she met the scientist in charge of determining the stupendous hues in which astronomical objects would be presented to the public, since most of their data was collected beyond the visible colour spectrum. Asked about the scientific basis for the rather gorgeous colours they’d settled upon for a certain nebula he told her, “we thought people would like them.” 

In a last-ditch bid for visual rationalism I tried my to white-balance my oldest camera on bit of snow atop the glacier ice but still (unavoidably) beneath a clear Arctic winter sky. It broke the algorithm. The camera gave an error code and turned everything a lurid green. In fact the Manual White Balance function has never worked since on that camera. So what you see here is recorded as raw sensor data — and adjusted back in the warmth of indoors based on nothing more scientific than my own highly debatable aesthetic tastes.  Just like NASA’s, really.


You can find Adam Sébire’s 1st Lockdown Residency for Art Arcadia, In the Lighthouse: A Modern Day Marooning, here.