Groenland is een prachtig landschap; logisch dat vele fotografen zich tot dit eiland aangetrokken voelen. En .. er wonen ook nog mensen, niet veel, slechts 60.000. Met een lange geschiedenis van overleven in kou en in een onherbergzaam klimaat. Beide aspecten, landschap en de mensen – de oorspronkelijke bewoners (inuit) en Denen – leveren veel fotografische mogelijkheden. De meeste fotografen komen slechts “voor eventjes” en zijn gericht op het landschap en de natuur. Sommigen fotografen blijven langer en hebben een meer diepgaande betrokkenheid op het land. Uit die categorie heb ik een beperkt aantal fotografen geselecteerd die ik de moeite waard vind. Deze selectie is niet gebaseerd op een complete research. Ik hou mij aanbevolen voor tips. “Mijn” teksten zijn bijna uitsluitend citaten van websites die ik op het internet vond alsmede een aantal links.
(Dolph Kessler)
De Australische fotograaf Murray Fredericks bezocht Groenland meerdere keren. Zijn focus ligt vooral op het landschap. Zijn allereerste bezoek liep bijna verkeerd af. Een artikel door Saffron Howden uit Sydney (Australia) geeft een goede indruk. Onder de foto’s de Engelse tekst.
At some point during the blizzard, gun in one hand and shovel in the other, Murray Fredericks realised art was not worth the risk. “I was woefully under-prepared,” the Sydney photographer says of his first trip to Greenland. “I ended up spending two weeks just staying alive.” In 2010, Fredericks – already well-known for his large body of work, – Salt, capturing the vast and brittle Lake Eyre in South Australia-, began tackling the landscape antithesis of Australia’s arid heart, the Greenland ice sheet.
Over a four-year period, he visited Greenland six times. On his first trip, the 44-year-old ventured out onto the ice cap alone, with a guide available only over the phone. He ran straight into a massive, four-day storm that nearly cost him his life. He was informed via his guide that two nearby adventurers were being tracked by polar bears and he was told to stay in his tent with his gun at the ready. But the father of four was forced to venture outside with a shovel into a wind chill of -50C when his tent began to collapse under the weight of the snow being dumped by the storm. Adventurers, Fredericks concludes, have a very different ethos from artists. “It’s art; there’s no justification for taking risks,” he says. But from this and subsequent, more fruitful, trips to Greenland’s harsh and lonely expanses,
Serendipitously, Fredericks met a man crossing the ice sheet who introduced him to a long-abandoned radar station that would come to be the lynchpin of his Greenland work and the focus of the documentary he made there. The station was one of dozens built in the late 1950s between Iceland and Alaska to give the Americans advance warning of a Soviet attack. Together, they were known as the Distant Early Warning Line. Fredericks says the stations were shut down in Greenland with just two hours’ notice in the late 1980s, not because the Berlin Wall was crumbling, but because of a lack of insurance. When he made his way inside the radar station a quarter of a century later, the sheets were still on the beds and a 1980s breakfast had been frozen in time. Since then, numerous adventurers have passed through the remote building. One of the still images in Fredericks’ new exhibition depicts the station’s pool table, where travellers etched their names into the felt.
Website: http://www.murrayfredericks.com.au/
