Songs from the cold seas

Tiina Itkonen and Olaf Otto Becker

Colorful portraits of the inhabitants of Thule and rushing rivers of melting water on the inland ice.

The exhibition Songs from the cold seas at The National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen takes us on a thought-provoking journey to some of the outskirts of Greenland accompanied by Finnish Tiina Itkonen’s sensitive portrait of Polar Eskimos and German Olaf Otto Becker’s monumental icescapes. The contemporary view on Greenland is contextualized by early Greenland-photographs from the museum’s collection. 

Today Greenland has become the pivotal point, when it comes to the debate on global climate changes. Around the year 1900 adventurers travelled to Greenland to explore the unknown country and bring back often superficial stories to the European mainland. Today scientists and politicians just as superficially travel to the island to witness the consequences of global climate changes as they appear in the Greenlandic nature.

The photographic descriptions of Greenland made by Tiina Itkonen and Olaf Otto Becker inevitably become part of the current political debate. But in contrast to the alarming iconic pictures of melting icebergs dominating today’s picture of Greenland, these photographs go way beyond and present a nuanced and reflected image of Greenland in the age of climate changes.

Tiina Itkonen concentrates on people. Through more than 10 years she has on numerous occasions travelled to Thule and here she has created a sensitive and compelling portrait of the living conditions of the Polar Eskimos in a nature and culture under pressure.

Since 2005 Itkonen has furthermore been working on a series of landscape photographs from Illulisaat to Qaannaq on the west coast of Greenland displaying the immensity and strangeness of the greenlandic ice- and landscapes.

While Itkonen has visited the populated area farthest north, Becker has travelled to the no-man’s-land on the Inland Ice and made a journey along the rough western coastline. In fascinating and overwhelming stills from a world hastily changing, Olaf Otto Becker documents in a prosaic photographic language the consequences of global pollution.