The stark Greenlandic landscape is a persistent presence in Storch’s photos, and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere. In one of Storch’s pictures, an old man on a wooden porch angles his face up toward the sun. In another, a knockout image featuring two children resting on their backs, sunlight blazes with an almost divisive intent, turning one child’s eyeglasses opaque with its glare while leaving his friend’s face in shadow. Looking at Storch’s work, my mind went to Emily Dickinson’s musings on a “certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons.” But Dickinson was observing her world at a latitude of forty-two degrees. Sunlight means something else entirely in photos made above or near the Arctic Circle, where noon could strike in darkness, depending on the season, and where golden hour might be a nearly constant affair.
I like Chan’s emphasis on light (“and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere”). Of the seventeen Storch pictures featured in Chan’s piece, my favorite shows a seemingly mundane slice of Arctic landscape (rock, tundra, apartment buildings) at a moment when the sun’s rays turn it to gold, and throw long, black shadows across its textured surface. The gold-black contrast is ravishing!
Photo by Inuuteq Storch
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