It has taken almost two weeks but at last my copy of this book has arrived. One of the reasons it has taken so long is the lousy service of Amazon! I try to use Amazon as little as possible, normally only as a last resort if something that I want is not available, or available but not as a reasonable price, elsewhere. I will not for now go into details! Second attempt and I now have it.

What is happening in the Arctic, environmentally, socially, culturally, is something that has interested, and concerned, me for some timed over the years I have read quite a lot about the region: in particular writers such as Barry Lopez, Marie and Kari Herbert, Jean Malaurie, Hugh Brody, Gretel Ehrlich, and most recently Kathleen Jamie (and even Rockwell Kent! – who reads him these days?). Though I have not travelled within the Alaskan or Canadian Arctic, I have spent a little time in Western Greenland and, albeit fairly superficially, have witnessed there some signs of climate change (most notably the effect on glaciers) and some of the social impacts on the indigenous population.

Quite coincidentally I have just read Jamie’s latest book (2019) which has a couple of chapters about archeological excavations at Quinhagak on the Alaskan North Shore. She paints a prose picture of how the region is suffering from environmental degradation – global heating melting the permafrost upon which the people still depend – and how that also leads to social and cultural degradation and loss.

This is precisely what Lixenberg has portrayed pictorially for the inhabitants of Shishmaref in Alaska. Again warming is causing the permafrost to melt which is leading to the island on which the settlement is established to be steadily but inexorably destroyed by the sea. When Lixenberg made her book it was estimated the community would have to leave and relocate by this year, 2020. It seems they are still hanging on, but in part because the Federal Government has been totally ineffective in establishing a new site for them and enabling a move.

For now I do not really want to get into a political or environmental rant about what is happening here. Rather, I want to focus instead on what I see as the significance of this book from the point of view of “landscape” photography. I have repeatedly expressed the view that what interests me in landscape photography is not just the appearance of the physical environment but also the people within it, how they relate to it, how the landscape affects them , and in turn how it is affected by them. Thinking about this from the point of view of Assignment 3, that I am currently working on, it is the involvement of, and intervention by, people that makes a space a place. Without the people who live there Shishmaref would be a small island that is steadily being eroded. Because people live there, because they have imprinted upon it their history and culture, and have in return had their history and culture shaped and moulded in part by the island, it has become a place, a very particular place. It is a place of significance, to the people who live there, to the wider ecology, and to the environment as a whole threatened by climate change.

Lixenberg’s book appeals and speaks to me because it addresses all of those elements. There are purely topographical images, firmly rooted in the Sublime, not at all Picturesque. But there are also portraits, still lives, not the stuff of traditional landscape photography. Taken together, this multivalent approach builds up a much bigger, more ‘realistic’ picture, and that is precisely what appeals to me. It fits with so many of the other photobooks in my library, too numerous to list again, in which the relationship between the physical environment and the people within it are inextricably linked (physically, emotionally, politically, historically, culturally) and that together they make up “the landscape”. Indeed, I think that without such a multi-layered approach the war would not have the same impact at all and not get across its environmental message.

This has made me reflect on the photographic work I have done so far on this module and what I would like to achieve in the future. So far people have been literally absent from the work I did for Assignment 2 and it will be the same for Assignment 3. However, I am increasingly conscious of the fact that their presence is at least implied, and inescapable. Without human intervention and involvement the things and places I have photographed, and am still photographing, would not necessarily not exist, but would at least be devoid of any real significance. I do not know to what extent it might be possible in the future – I have not looked at Assignment 5 yet and there is not much scope in 6 – but this is something that I would like to explore further. Possibly there is something here for the critical review that makes up Assignment 4?

Jamie, K, (2019). Surfacing. London: Sort of Books

Lixenberg, D, (2008). The Last Days of Shishmaref. Edam/Rotterdam: Paradox/episode

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