Sermermiut 1, Ilulissat, 2007 - A view of the path to Sermermiut. It is about 20 minutes walk from Ilulissat to Sermermiut, featuring beautiful views to Ilulissat Icefjord. The Ilulissat Icefjord, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, is the sea mouth of Sermeq Kujalleq, the most active glacier in the northern hemisphere. (Tiina Itkonen)
Finnish photographer , 47, has been photographing Greenland’s beautiful landscape, as well as its indigenous Inuit and Inughuit cultures, for almost 20 years, capturing the vast stillness of this remote, breathtaking region.
Itkonen told that she first set off to Greenland in 1995 after being inspired by the country’s famous legend of the , a story in and fall to the bottom of the ocean, later becoming the creatures that sustain the Inuit people: . She has since returned to Greenland 11 times, staying several weeks or months at a time. On her first stays between 1995, she lived and worked among the Inughuit in the northwest Thule region, a vast area home to only 800. From 2002 onwards, she also began traveling regularly along the west coast of Greenland.
What keeps her coming back, she said, is the pristine nature of these vast regions. “What fascinates me most are the extreme and wild landscapes of the Arctic, with majestic icebergs and amazing light” Itkonen told . “Pristine nature starts almost [right] when you open your door… You can see so far into the distance that the space has a calming, hypnotic effect.”
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Itkonen said she she spends great amounts of time getting to know the landscapes she photographs, returning to time and time again, to explore the area at all times of the day and in all kinds of weather. In fact, she said, she doesn’t even bring her camera along on the first days getting to know a new place.
“I wait, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days for the right moment to take photographs,” she said.
Travel is also tricky on this ice-clad island, because there are no real roads. Itkonen often hitches rides with local hunters by boat or dog sled, or sometimes will fly from village to village by helicopter or light aircraft. The weather can also change very quickly, forcing her to stay in one place for several days or even a week until it is safe to keep moving.
While Itkonen said she was accustomed to snow from living in Finland, it was Greenland that taught her how to dress for being outside for long periods of time. “Even if the weather is not freezing, you get cold easily,” she explained. “My toes and hands freeze often, even if I have wool layers, warm boots and seal skin gloves.” Sometimes it gets so cold, she adds, that she would have to borrow fur clothes from the locals she lived with to keep warm.
Since her first visit in 1995, Itkonen says it is impossible to deny the fact that the landscapes she is photographing have begun to show the effects of climate change. Ice fields are shrinking, new land is being exposed, and sea ice is getting thinner, making ice hunting more dangerous. “Hunters have told me that they have fallen through the thin ice,” she said. “Traveling by dog sled on the sea ice is not safe anymore.”
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Itkonen’s photographs are currently on display in Anchorage, Alaska, at a group exhibition “” until April 24. More of her photographs can also be seen on her website, , and a book of her photographs, “,” published in 2014 by Kehrer Verlag, is available for purchase on Amazon.