Lynn Davis
Artist statement
For over twenty years I have made the long
journey from New York to Greenland to
photograph the giant icebergs that calve
off the glacier in Ilulissat, a small town on
the northwest coast that faces Disco Bay, and
beyond, the Labrador Sea. My first trip to the
Arctic was in 1986. Four journeys later, in 2007,
my journeys came to a melancholy end when
the giant glacier had become so diminished in
size that icebergs, such as I had known them,
became almost impossible to find. Going, going
and no doubt gone was the mystical experience of
awe that I first experienced when photographing
that changing alchemy of ice and water that
created such monolithic forms.
In those early days I took for granted that there
would always be a glacier, and that once summer
arrived, the glacier, as it had for thousands of
years, would naturally calve endless flotillas of
icebergs to float slowly towards the Labrador
Sea. What was first a mystical and life changing
experience has now turned to an awareness,
that nature as we have known it and taken for
granted is now disappearing faster than we
had ever imagined. It has been my melancholy
privilege to record and celebrate such an
extraordinary journey of impermanence and
renewal. It is my hope and prayer that by
witnessing and recording such transcendent
phenomena that it is not too late to change
what now seems like an irreversible fate.