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In July 2001 I spent 12 days in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. This northernmost reach of Europe, unknown to most North Americans, is spectacular. Countless tidewater glaciers spill into the sea. Huge seabird colonies overwhelm your senses with their cacophony. It has the largest concentration of polar bears anywhere in the world. At 80 N. latitude, the sun spins a wide circle in the sky for 24 hours.
Governed by Norway, tourism is highly regulated and restricted to a few cruise ship
operators. This Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris tour was the first cruise in this region organized solely for the benefit of photographers. Following are photographs and excerpts from the journal.
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Dispatch One
We have anchored in a fiord after motoring all "night." Outside my portal is a tidewater glacier. The ice glows a ghostly blue. Luminous low clouds graze the mountaintops.
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The zodiac bumps through a 4 foot chop, towards the incandescent glacier. We pass through bergy-bits, fragments of the glacier. An ocean with ice cubes. The water is a dirty blue-gray, silty from the meltwater. The passage is rough and I am anxious and the situation is unfamiliar. Then the stark differentness of the place punches through my discomfort. I feel very far from home, in another world.
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It is a sublimely austere, beautiful world. On the sand towards the glacier, round chunks of drift ice litter the shore, like white jewels. The sun peeks through a thick gray sky, above the blue-white glacier and the brown mountains. Soon I am alone with the scene, and I spend time with the ice, just being here. I resist the urge to shoot away, to occupy my mind with photographic concerns. I want to be in the place first, and we have the luxury of several hours on this beach. Slowly the photographs emerge. I work carefully and consciously.
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The land looks barren at first. Sand, gray rocks, brown heaps of mountains hard against the beach. But I walk uphill just a few yards and there is a brilliant purple clump. And another, and another, a carpet of purple saxifrage. I sit down to examine it. The diminutive five-petalled flowers grow in a clump of contrasting brilliant green. And the rocks underneath me are clothed in a patchwork of fluorescent orange lichen.
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The splash of waves on the sand is less here, and I hear cries from the cliffs, thin high calls, and I realize it is a huge multitude of sound. Above me a vast city of birdlife on the steep cliff. Glassing the sky I see great flocks of Fulmar, stiff-winged seabirds, and groups of smaller birds, Thick-Billed Murres most likely.
A Parasitic Jaeger swoops near me and settles on a rock 30 yards away, then leaves. When I scan the fjord I see, camouflaged in the floating ice, small groups of white and black ducks, Common Eider. There is no bird here with a color other than black, brown or white.
Dispatch Two
"Kreee-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki!" times ten thousand. Tiny and pudgy, the Dovekies swoop en masse down the slope, wheel around the bay and soar over our heads, then again over the water, and back to the rocks. We are on a steep slope of granite boulders, and the female Dovekies are on eggs deep underneath in the crevices, safe from foxes and gulls. Occasionally they call from deep under us. The males get settled picturesquely on the boulders, not 30 feet away, then a Glaucous Gull soars over the cliffside, and ten thousand birds are noisily on the wing again. These gulls can take an adult Dovekie on the wing, and devour it whole.
Motor drives fire all about me. I get caught up in the frenzy, and shoot a good two rolls of tight portraits before the thought occurs to me — why? Mostly I am enjoying being so close to the birds, but as far as any professional purpose, nothing could be more obscure than this little black and white Arctic bird. The soaring birds beneath me, downslope, now that is compelling. I station myself in their flight path. I feel like I am in the middle of the flock as they practically part around me. So for two hours that's what I do — work to get a landscape that has the feeling of this place. I organize the frame, then wait for the next rush of birds. They are as regular as a train schedule.
Dispatch Three
A restless night. The ocean swell wakes me with mild alarm, as the boat rolls severely. It rocks me from side to side of the bunk, and I am glad to have put my laptop in a drawer. The next time I wake is to a generalized crash and shudder through the hull. I look out the porthole and the ocean is white. Polygonal wedges of ice stretch to the horizon and we are breaking through it. When I wake again we are in a fog and a still sea.
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The polar bear has been elusive. All yesterday morning we cruised an area where they are known to occur. There were many tracks, but no bear. This morning we are near some islands, and walrus are sighted at a distance. A zodiac sets out with trip leaders, but they decide that because of the fog it is too dangerous to explore.
The sky lifts, at last. The ship shoves aside or crunches through pancake sea ice, white polygons outlined by opaque black water. One floe that passes directly under starboard has a straight line of huge polar bear prints.
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I see him first. A yellowish, white shape, impossibly far away, but it is moving. It has legs. "I have a bear;" I say quietly. Then louder, more confident of my sighting, "Bear! There, under the mountain that looks like Gibraltar, go left."
As the ship maneuvers closer, we see that there is a second bear, laying on another ice floe. Gulls are in the air around it. The first bear is making a beeline toward what is probably a kill. It walks straightaway off the ice, into the ocean, and swims.
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As the new bear approaches, the one on the carcass slips into the water and swims away. Our ship parks just off the floe and we watch the interloper, unconcerned about us, tear the skin off the seal and gnaw on the fat layer underneath. It is a large carcass, that of a Bearded Seal. Entrails lay neatly coiled on the snow. Ivory and Glaucous Gulls dash in to forage on the edges, and fifty more birds wait in the water for their turn.
This is as good as it gets. Wayne Lynch, who has probably spent more time in more places with Polar Bears than anyone else living, has never photographed a bear on a carcass with anything less than an 860mm lens. I could shoot this one with my wide-angle panoramic camera. The captain moves the boat around the back side of the floe, and we shoot the bear from a different angle.
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After a couple of hours (this bear wasn't going anywhere), we back off for a belated dinner. It is Fourth of July. The Russian staff has prepared an American barbecue on the back deck. There are ribs and drumsticks, potato salad and cole slaw and wine. The picnickers are encased in Arctic clothing. We graze our meal and we watch the bear gnaw his in the low sun. Eventually the satiated bear walks away from the carcass, swims to the shorefast ice, and wanders off.
Then we party. Beegees, Spice Girls and Russian pop music. We dance, vodka is drunk. I swing-dance with all comers. We form a circle, and improvise a group dance. For the first time this trip, I feel warm.
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Dispatch Four
On a low, stony island are a herd of walrus. We make landfall on a pebble beach. There is no vegetation. The pebbles are granite, quartz, basalt — a colorful kaleidoscope. On each rock is a constellation of lichens, black ones, orange ones, green ones. The rocks have been sitting here for a very long time. A Red Phalarope sits on a nest a few yards from our landing. Arctic Terns dive bomb us when we move forward. These are less habituated to people than the ones in town, their attacks are more violent. I am hit on the head repeatedly by their feet.
The walrus are sleeping, mostly. There is much grunting and passing of gas. It is pungent. When one moves, he has to drag his body with great effort on two elephantine front legs, and every animal readjusts and groans until the herd settles down. Walrus lies upon walrus. It is a blubbery, grotesque mass of animal. When I am reincarnated I do not want to come back as a walrus.
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Dispatch Five
The crenellated basalt cliffs tower hundreds of feet overhead. We drift with the motor off, just feet from the nesting Thick-Billed Murres. Craning my neck, I see a ragged sawtooth cliff summit, and tens upon tens of thousands of birds, stacked on the rock, and filling the air. The calls are not loud, but come from all directions. Flocks of hundreds swim just off the zodiac, then dive as one. A mild guano scent wafts over the boat.
The cliff is a sheer perpendicular drop to the water. At first I feel overwhelmed with so much to see and hear, and focus through the camera to orient myself. After an hour on the water, I lay back, and try to feel the intensity of life in this dramatic venue. Glaucous Gulls and Kittiwakes harass the colony, so birds are constantly in motion. The air is full of thousands of flying, crying silhouettes. The effect is of distilled, noisy essence of Arctic life.
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Dispatch Six
The ice and the water. Black deep water, brilliant white ice, snowy striated mountains all around. A lead gray sky, a thin layer of brightness at the horizon. Then reversed, a bright gray sky and a dark band. Ever-changing, subtle, monochrome.
I shoot roll after roll of b/w panoramic of the scenes, watching the composition of white and black, ice and water, and the horizontal banding of the sky change as we pass through the landscape. The air is dead calm, and the sun hazily reflects a twin globe beneath us. The air feels relatively balmy, maybe 40 F.
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Dispatch Seven
From a distance I see tributary glacier after tributary pouring from adjacent valleys into the main river of ice. Up close it is a 2 mile long wall of blue. The glacial bits coating the fjord's sea are make a crackling noise, like rice krispies in milk. The popping is from the release of air, thousands of years old. In the fore of the glacier is an enormous flock of Kittiwakes, thousands strong. When a berg calves from the face and crashes into the water, they all take to the air.
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Dispatch Eight
"Our five o'clock bear is here," says Joe on the PA. A curious polar bear approaches the ship. He is immediately adjacent to us on the ice, literally at our feet. He sniffs, trying to make sense of us. He stands up on his hind legs, with his front paws on the boat. He tastes it. One photographer has his head and camera stuck out of a 3rd level porthole, which intrigues the bear to no end. It seems wise for him to withdraw before the bear makes a leap. I imagine this bear thinking, "How do I open this thing?" Bored with the boat, he flattens himself on the snow to cool off. He rolls on his back with his paws up. He acts like a big, white endearing teddy bear.
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Additional Photographs
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Arctic tern attacking
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Herd of photographers
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Arctic Tern nest
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Arctic tern attacking
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Bearded Seal
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Ice in glacial fjiord
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"Fogbow" behind ship
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14th of July Glacier
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Svalbard Reindeer
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About the author
Doug Plummer became a professional photographer in the mid 1980s. Based in the Seattle-area, he concentrates on producing commercial stock photos and his work is represented by Photonica. He has traveled to the Arctic, the Caribbean, the Czech Republic, Australia, Alaska, England and Ireland, as well as throughout the US to create photos for stock as well as fine prints. Over the past three years he has traveled throughout Ireland using photography and writing to examine the relationship of music and the landscape in Irish culture. An exhibit of the Ireland Project will be at The Edward Carter Gallery in New York, opening January 10, 2002.
You can see more of Doug's work by visiting his web site at www.dougplummer.com.
All materials Doug Plummer
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