Ephemeral Ice / Eternal Water
Scoresby Sund, East Greenland · 2015 · developed through field travel across fjord, ice, tundra, and coastal environments
Ephemeral Ice / Eternal Water is a photographic work made during a schooner expedition through Scoresby Sund, East Greenland.
The project follows a brief human passage through a vast Arctic environment, moving between aircraft, settlement, vessel, open water and land. Moving through Scoresby Sund gradually recalibrated a sense of scale, as human movement and duration became increasingly difficult to measure against ice, water, and geological space.
Rather than treating the landscape as backdrop, the photographs attend to the changing conditions of encounter: distance, proximity, movement, weather, scale and the temporary presence of the traveller within a place that continues far beyond them.
The journey began through systems of transit and orientation.
Planes, boats, maps, windows, decks and navigation instruments provided temporary structures through which the landscape could be approached and understood.
They offered a sense of direction, but also made visible the limits of that control.
As the expedition moved deeper into the fjords, those human frameworks became increasingly slight against the scale of the surrounding terrain.
Ice first appeared at a distance as architecture: monumental, isolated, almost immovable.
Closer encounters complicated that impression.
Surfaces revealed fracture, sediment, translucency, submerged edges and forms shaped by continual exposure to water and weather. What had seemed singular and stable became visibly temporary.
The work gradually shifts from spectacle toward attention.
The photographs move from vast formations to small details, from horizon to surface, from looking outward to looking closely.
At this scale, the Arctic becomes less an image of remoteness and more a field of physical evidence: erosion, melt, texture, residue and change.
Returning to land introduced another measure of time.
Glaciers entered the frame as part of larger mountain systems. Meltwater crossed rock and tundra. Vegetation, bone and exposed ground suggested cycles occurring beyond the visible drama of the ice itself.
The landscape was no longer encountered only as something immense, but as something layered, inhabited and marked by different measures of time.
The expedition lasted only a short time.
The photographs remain as evidence of that temporary passage: a human journey through a place that could never be fully possessed, fixed or understood within the duration of the visit.
Revisited a decade later, the archive takes on an added resonance as East Greenland continues to undergo rapid environmental change. The photographs do not function as longitudinal evidence, but as a record of one encounter with a landscape whose conditions are still shifting.
The journey ended. The landscape continues.
Selected images, image sequences, and wider unpublished archive material are available for editorial, publishing, institutional, and selected commercial licensing. Please get in touch with details of the intended use, territory, duration, and image requirements for availability and a tailored quote.
The archive includes further studies of ice formations, fjord systems, glacial terrain, tundra, expedition life, and the movement between land and water.
Open to selected editorial, publishing, licensing, speaking, and collaborative enquiries.
Licensing, Editorial & Collaboration Enquiries
Tell me a little about the publication, project, intended use, or collaboration you have in mind.