My Kind of Paradise, an expedition to Svalbard.

I stand on the deck, in the front of the ship, apart from one or 2 other die hard photographers I am alone outside. The wind blows and cuts into my face, yes it is cold, but I don’t really mind. I dig my chin deeper into the collar of my bright orange (such an out of place colour!) arctic duvet coat, my gloved hands in my pockets, my cameras dangling by my sides. My hands reach for my camera, one or the other, then back into my pockets. White mountains that continuously change, clouds that do the same. The sun shines and beams through the clouds, then it starts snowing again. The clouds are constantly changing colour and shape. The ship cuts through the ice, bang-bang it sounds. Then the ice is gone and water is as flat as a lake. There is drama and at the same time calm, all around. For hours I stand here and soak it all in. I am over the moon. This is my kind of paradise.

my travel diary

It has been nearly a year, and still I hadn’t finished processing all my photos of this trip. There must have been a reason why I couldn’t put myself to this fun job. There was.

Svalbard, the archipalago located far up north inside the Arctic Circle, has touched my soul.

Yves Adams, our guide through the expedition, had warned me : ‘Now you will suffer from The Arctic Blues‘, I had no idea what he meant at that moment, but I do now.

Even before arrival I already had a hunch that I was going to a special place : 10 of our group of 12 photographers were going for the 2nd up to the 9th time to this inhospitable place. That must mean something, it would have been odd had I remained untouched by that virus.

For starters, it is, or it at least seems to be, at the end of the world. Even though it’s only about 3000 km from where I live, it took me 2 days to get there. Flying from Brussels to Copenhagen, then to Oslo where I spend the night so I could take the one and only daily flight to Lonyearben in the morning, with a stop over in Tromsø. 5 Airports in 2 days.

One thing Svalbard in winter isn’t famous for, is its agreeable weather. It’s situated above the Arctic circle so it does not come as a surprise that the weather is… arctic

Longyearbyen, the capital, is a small and quite boring little town, but I soon left it behind me when I boarded the expedition ship, the icebreaker MS Freya, and off we went, into the wild. Let’s get that party started! The MS Freya is a strong ship, able to go through deep ice, and that is what we did : we sailed up north towards the pack ice, in search of beautiful landscapes and wildlife.

That is an easy thing to do : the island is stunning. Bare, empty mountains white with snow, ice on the water surface. The pack ice, that reaches from the islands up to the north pole, is particularly impressive. It feels surreal to be ‘so close’ to that mystical place : basically you can just start to walk direction north. There is no -or hardly any- sign of humans on the land nor on the sea. The wildlife is omnipresent.

Words cannot capture its beauty, nor can photos. Even though the place is raw nature, untouched by humans, still its ecosystem is incredibly fragile thanks to humans that live far off. Never before was I so close to the symptoms of global warming, never before I was confronted in such a way. The pack ice is melting, and the Polar bear is having a hard time to survive. I always had a soft spot for bears in general, but the polar bear is a different level to bear-being. Will our (grand)children still be able to see them in real life?

Life was hard on the MS Freya, especially when a day lasts 24 hours, you’re a photographer, and you suffer from Fear Of Missing Out. My days quickly changed into nights where I tried to get as much sleep as possible, and nights, when the sun remained low above the horizon and the light was soft, changed into days. My fitness tracker sending me constant warnings : ‘aim for sleep’ (no sh*t), but I had no time for such an activity. It was not just lack of sleep that messed up my circadian rhythm : the lack of darkness was totally messing with my head! While my brain said it must be around 6pm, it was already midnight, which is the oddest thing!

But the beauty, the loneliness, the harshness, the emptiness, the 4 seasons in one day, the snow and ice, made it all more than worth it. It all touched my soul.

It was hard to work on my photos, to transmit what it is really like and how I remember it. It’s much more than just beautiful landscapes. I know that most people will never ever get to go there, the climate does scare most people off, and I feel privileged that I could, and for that reason I feel obliged to at least try to transmit what is really like there. I tried, over and over again, not being pleased with the result. Until I decided to put all those nice colours in a raw black and white painting-like image. That is what it was like raw and harsh. And that’s the moment that I knew it’s time to finish them all off, and work on my book.

Finally the book is ready. It has both the idyllic photos ánd the black and white images. You can buy the book here, all the images you find in there, as well as the ones that are on my website can be bought as a print, whether framed or not. Contact me for information.