Svalbard
This is an artist book of photographs of the Svalbard Archipelago. The book is in an edition of 8. It includes an essay by Janike Kampevold Larsen. Closed the Clamshell Box measures 22.5”x 15.25” Open the Book Measures 21.25”x28.5”.
Layout by Ian van Coller. Photographs by Ian van Coller are pigment prints on Asuka. Drum Leaf bound in full cloth (with cloth-covered clamshell box) by John DeMerritt in Emeryville, CA.
Svalbard: Archipelago of Time
by Janike Kampevold Larsen
The archipelago that we know as Svalbard began as Devonian deposits harbored deep within the earth’s crust more than 360 million years ago. Some of those organic deposits transformed into coal as they drifted north over great distances, during eras in which tectonic plates collided to create inundations and uplifts, sedimentation and erosion, and the folding of mountains. The world’s largest array of observable geologic eons and events can be found in Svalbard, and it is one of the very few locales in which geology from the Mesozoic period (252–66 million years ago) sees the light of day. The final era of faulting and folding, some 60–40 million years ago, left Svalbard’s current terrain exposed in the Arctic Ocean.
What has most shaped Svalbard’s modern landscape, however, is the relatively recent work performed by ice, weathering, and human influence. While most of the inland territory is covered in ice, the narrow coastal margin is strewn with cultural accumulations that date back to the expansive seventeenth-century whaling industry, and continue through two centuries of hunting and industrial adventures—including aviation technologies developed during the race to reach the North Pole around 1900. The most recent historical layer is formed by relics from extensive coal mining throughout the twentieth century: iron, coal, and ramshackle mining structures. And at present, a new layer of human technology permeates the archipelago’s topography: radar stations, antenna parks, and a wide array of tools, instruments, and other scientific measurement devices. In Svalbard it is sometimes impossible to tell the natural from the artificial; wood, coal, and corroded iron are slowly blending into the barren ground.
The archipelago’s permafrost has been monitored since 1998 and during this time its temperature has been increasing. The upper “active” layer of the permafrost, the layer that cyclically thaws in the summer and freezes in the winter, has become deeper, and for the last 10–15 years scientists have begun to find remains of ancient reptiles (ichthyosaurs) close to the surface of the loose hillsides. These findings add to the already rich occurrence of traces of former life that are strewn in areas of the territory, including fossil imprints of deciduous forest such as gingko, and various palm trees also deposited in the Devonian. In the early 1900s, the Norwegian explorer and botanist Hanna
Resvoll-Holmsen traveled the Svalbard territory, cataloguing its flora. In one of her many poetic descriptions of the area she writes: “Here, we find the most wonderful imprints of leaves of linden and maple, magnolia, poplar, oak, hazel and bald cypress . . . as if between the pages in an herbarium.” She goes on to describe Devonian deposits infused with petrified armored fish in the mountainsides around the Ice Fjord near Longyearbyen, and ocean floor sedimentation with “rich beds of lime and millions upon millions of sea shells and of coral.” Resvoll-Holmsen was a biologist specializing in Arctic flora and was especially appreciative of Svalbard’s scarce and enduring vegetation, and in many ways she describes the landscape as a living forest—which, in truth, it is not. When she speaks of coal extraction, she calls it modern forestry, and she portrays the coal itself as a marvelous petrified tropical forest of infinite age. In the early 1900s, when most people would have found Svalbard a cold and unforgiving Arctic desert, Resvoll-Holmsen resorts to metaphors of comfort and abundance that reveal the rich green forests of a warmer past in an effort to mediate the experience of the landscape. Such scientific and artistic renderings alike can transform the way we experience complex topographies.
Ian van Coller’s photographic projects embrace landscapes from tropical forests to glaciers, and none of them is less than alluring. Birds, tropical trees and foliage, ice, sand, silt, and clay are portrayed as shapes, light, and color. In The Last Glacier (2015), he depicts glacial shape and texture, keenly observing how glaciers sit, curve, and meet their surrounding terrains—how a patch of dead ice melts down quietly, smoothly dissipating in a bump in the earth. His photos of larger glaciers reveal the flow of the ice, as it breaks up and forms carpets of jagged pinnacles.
In the present series of images, van Coller describes Svalbard’s contemporary assortment of coastal and glacial landscapes, all of which are somehow shaped by human culture. He captures the vestiges of historic industry still found on the beaches and in the bays in West Spitsbergen, the center of the prolific Dutch whaling activity of the 1600s, areas used later for hunting, and now for research. Blubber ovens, wooden huts, walrus bones, and walrus graveyards are integral elements in this geography—a landscape in which all traces of human activity older than 1946, of all categories and scales, are preserved under the Svalbard
Environmental Protection Act of 2001. Nothing may be removed, and everything is gradually corroding or otherwise disintegrating and blending into the scenery. As so often in van Coller’s work, these photos tend to place the landscape in time. Some portray glacial ice, whether of tidewater glaciers that have calved or landlocked slicks of dead ice, and a photo from Esmarkbreen has been subtly framed to reveal a “new” foreground of moraine material and erratic debris of small and larger rocks that the glacier has dropped as it retreats.
The literal material of Svalbard’s terrain is ever-present: red sandstone and greyer shales, often with intrusions of minerals and coal that together form hillsides and escarpments of sand and silt. Due to the lack of vegetation, we easily identify these rocks, sands, and sediments both as evidence of specific geologic periods and as accounts of their making. The geological antiquity of this landscape is abundantly apparent, and in van Coller’s photographs that perception of deep time is sometimes amplified by a thin veil of fresh snow.
In one photo we see a few translucent lumps of ice on a beach. Some of us are lucky enough to have heard these bits of ice as they float ashore after falling off a glacier front. Whether bobbing in the sea or resting on the beach, the ice bits “pop” for hours or days as bubbles and pockets of oxygen trapped inside begin to escape. Depending on the glacier they fell from, they can be anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand years old. These vocal ice lumps speak of the deep time in which they were formed. As we listen, we become aware not only of the slow persistence of geologic time that created Svalbard’s terrain—but also that it is perpetually changing, and that parts of it eventually will be undone.
Climate change imposes on us an accelerated sense of time, as we imagine future change and loss of both ice and landform. Ian van Coller’s images, which rest in the richness of color, light, and materials that he finds in landscapes such as Svalbard’s, allow us to regain our sense of immediacy and joy at what exists now.