Greenland’s Future
There are some countries that conjure up an air of mystery when their name is mentioned. For me, Greenland is one such place. It’s safe to say that unless you’re Danish, the odds of knowing someone else who’s visited this frozen landscape are pretty slim. An overnight WhatsApp from my editor, reading “Let’s talk about the possibility of quick Greenland trip” gave me the opportunity I’d been hoping for.
Only once before have I ever flown to somewhere with the same sense of uncertainty about whether flights will actually take place, and that was St Helena back in 2017. Back then, the issue was the strong mid-Atlantic winds, but this time it was all about the ice. A 24 hour layover in Copenhagen due to a frozen runway gave me the chance to begin brainstorming what I was going to be doing on arrival. Any plan of folding into the travelling pool of photographers covering a visit by US Vice President JD Vance’s wife Usha was quickly squashed due to hermetically-sealed security levels, and a change of the VP’s plan, with them now only flying into a remote US space base in the far North. Another photographer asked if it was worth heading up there anyway and trying to get in. “You can certainly head up if you want”, came the official’s reply, “but you won’t get into the base, there’s nowhere to stay and you’ll freeze to death on the runway”.
Weeks into the invasion of the journalists, the residents of Nuuk were tired. My requests for access to various feature ideas such as security forces, musicians, artists and politicians were ignored or denied with a somewhat abrupt tone by all but one person. The country is not used to being in the spotlight, and the resulting behaviour of an energised media. One photographer I met told me of a friend who works as a doctor, and has had whole meetings with patients where the patient says nothing, communicating only through the subtle use of facial expressions; a slight raising of the eyebrows for yes and a knitted brow for no. Having members of the media sticking a microphone and a camera in your face as you walk through the street, with requests for your personal thoughts on the current game of geo-political chess taking place over your homeland must feel unbelievably invasive to some residents. I could understand their reluctance in replying to me.
Like most foreign assignments, I’m pretty much left to my own devices beyond being asked to go. Flights, hotels, rental cars, stories and angles are all up to me to source and work out, aside from an occasional tip to consider from my editor in London. Coming in to work on a story a few weeks after not only rival agencies but even colleagues from the same company places a photographer at a definite disadvantage. The desire to avoid recreating the work of others comes at a cost to your own production. “I’ve seen that mural shot by everyone else so I won’t bother” is a dangerous path. Nuuk is small. For a capital city, it’s very small. On par with a small town in England, it has a population of around 20,000. The luxury of choosing to avoid photographing certain landmarks is not one that a late arrival to Nuuk has. With that in mind, it became a case of trying to find the different angle, light or time of day for certain musts.
Humans have an amazingly powerful ability to become accustomed to the unusual. On leaving the airport and driving towards the bay, the vista opened up and I saw my first ever blue iceberg. It’s not something that I’d ever considered before but I just didn’t think that they’d be so, well, blue. According to a local, the age of the ice dictates its colour with white being the bubble-filled new berg on the block, going through shades of blue as it ages, with the darkest blue being the both the oldest and the most compressed.
Greenland is approaching its third decade of continual annual ice loss, with over 5 trillion tons lost since 1992. A report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has stated that between Autumn 2023 and Autumn 2024 alone, Greenland lost around 55 gigatons of ice and snow.
Browsing the map of Nuuk on my phone, my attention was caught by “Fight Club Nanoq”. A quick online search later and I realised that I’d found Greenland’s only boxing club. I’m a big fan of finding a different angle on a story so my mind began playing with the symbolism of a Greenlandic population, training to fight for its survival as Donald Trump’s America prowled the horizon. Arriving at the school gym after classes had finished for the day, I was reminded why it’s always a little unwise to try to predict a story. Life has a way of throwing you a curveball if you think like that. Walking through the door, I was greeted by a gym full of children, ranging from 11 to late teens (plus a random 28-year-old) warming up for the session. Fight Club Nanoq was started by three boxing trainers as way to not only provide something for young people to do, but also in direct response to the ongoing crisis of mental health in the population.
Greenland holds the unfortunate title of having the highest suicide rate in the world, with a heartbreaking 60 per 100,000 deaths compared to the United Kingdom’s 8 per 100,000, with suicide being the biggest cause of death in young men. Life can be hard in the larger towns and cities but it’s out in the wilderness that it becomes a major problem. The multiple threats of low prosperity, long periods of darkness, an ongoing erosion of Inuit culture, and seeing the real world effects of climate change are thought to be the ingredients that create a perfect storm. I was just glad that some young people were able to take advantage of these free classes, funded by the Government and local businesses. I hope Fight Club Nanoq goes from strength to strength, and is able to provide this kind of support across the country.
Back on the original purpose of political coverage, while I was there, the winner of the recent election was able to form a coalition and an event was called in the cultural centre to mark the occasion. Coming as I do from London, where every political event requires accreditation, applications, security sweeps and long waits to hold a position, it was clear which of the media were from a similar background. Arriving two hours before the event was due to start, I was greeted by confused looking staff and a handful of photographers from other international agencies wondering why they had arrived quite so early. As I touched on above, so much of life here has felt the culture shock of the arrival of larger media organisations. Following the press conference, a frustrated member of the Government communications team tried in vain to keep us all in a small cordoned area, asking the Prime Minister if he wanted the television cameras removed for asking him questions without permission. There was nothing malicious in her actions as I can certainly tell when that’s the case, it was more an inexperience of dealing with a group of journalists on deadline. As it was, the international media present were an incredibly well-behaved bunch so I dread to imagine what would have occurred if some of the more “pro-active” characters had turned up.
I work in imagery rather than words but it was hard not to pick up on the general mood among the population; Greenlanders are nervous about what is to come. When the President of the United States says he will take Greenland and won’t rule out a military attack to get it, it’s a real cause for concern. For years, Greenland has lived under the protection of “Arctic Peace”, an international agreement that the world will work to maintain a stable and cooperative environment in the Arctic region. The Arctic Council's Strategic Plan 2021-2030 still aims to maintain the Arctic as a "region of peace, stability and constructive cooperation", but recent developments look set to completely upend this. Greenland’s defence is minimal so, up to now, has primarily relied on respect and trust as its shield. We appear to have entered a period when such things can no longer be relied upon.
An aspect of life in Greenland that you can’t quite appreciate until you get there is the absence of roads. In total, Greenland has 90 miles of them, only 40 miles of which are paved. This means that every city, town and village is its own island of life, accessible only by air, sea or snowmobile. In the UK, there are people who protest over conspiracy stories about Government plans of forcing the population into “Fifteen Minute Cities”, due to Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) schemes, but out here, it’s the real deal and fifteen minutes would be long enough to do three laps around town on foot. Opening Google Maps on my phone and trying to decide where to explore, the limits quickly become apparent as the roads just stop. It’s like being in an open world computer game that never really is totally open world, with roads meeting cliffs, mountains or simply dead-ends, no matter which direction you head.
Another unfortunate side-effect of these “Inuitbush City Limits” is that smack bang in the middle of Nuuk is their new international airport, meaning that any attempt to fly a drone is met with flight permission locks, screen warnings and a general inability to fly (well, legally anyway). You literally can’t get far enough away from the airport boundary as the roads run out before the no-fly zone. With that in mind, I decided to jump aboard the Nuuk Water Taxi for their 2-hour fjord adventure, allowing me to finally get out of the zone and put my drone up for a different viewpoint. At this point in my post, I should be able to post a lovely image of a glacier, shot from a sea eagle’s viewpoint but it wasn’t to be. Reaching the frozen waterfall and seeing that we’d be staying in that spot for a few minutes, I took off, only to immediately hit the strong winds I’d been unaware of, once the drone was a few metres up. Any readers that have been in this situation before will know exactly the feeling I had; slowly but surely, my drone was drifting away, any attempt to fly it back was just met with a slight slowing in it’s journey to an icy doom. Trying everything I could, I eventually dropped it as low as I could and limped it back towards the boat, cringing as random gusts forced it to dip further towards the waves. Eventually, it was over the boat but, even then, it was hugely unpredictable due to the wind. Its eventual landing was far from graceful. Man, I hate drones.
Once my hands had stopped shaking, the drone was locked out of sight and my heart rate had returned to normal, I considered the rise in tourism that Greenland has been experiencing since the opening of direct flights from both Europe and America to Nuuk. While hotels, stores and restaurants will be savouring this influx of cash, that issue of the erosion of cultural identity rears its head once again. I was asked a number of times during my stay for my feelings on the place, and each time I sang the praises of its current vibe of being somewhere undeniably different. As lucky as I am to be able to travel quite a bit for work, it’s always disappointing to arrive in a new country and walk down the high street, to be greeted by Starbucks, H&M, McDonalds and Zara. Nuuk, and I’d like to assume the whole of Greenland, is currently refreshingly free of the big international chains that make every other city so dull. It’s certainly no Wild West outpost town but it still manages to feel like you’re experiencing something new.
Adding a cherry to the top of the sense of the unusual, I received word from my editor that a partial solar eclipse was due to take place while I was in Greenland, and to see if I could make anything of it. Working in the UK, any previous attempt to cover solar events has resulted in a set of photos of people optimistically wearing viewing glasses while staring at a thick blanket of cloud, so this was a chance to break my streak and actually see something. Firing up the PhotoPills app the day before, I scratched my head to identify something in the city that would make an identifiable foreground. Hoping that fate would be on my side and I’d be able to use the statue of Hans Egede, I wandered down to what I hope would be the right spot 24 hours earlier to test the theory. This looked promising. The following day, I drove down and sat in my car, watching as the cloud stubbornly sat on the horizon, illuminated from behind by the glow of the rising sun. Come on. Please. For me. Please. Suddenly, on the crest of the hill, the sun appeared, but not just the sun, the sun with a growing chunk taken out of it. I couldn’t believe it. It had worked! This was going to be perfect! Hang on. What, or rather who, is that? As I watched the crescent sun slowly raise to the perfect spot, a camera crew appeared on the hilltop and began to set up their gear. One walked around, chatting on his phone, while idly kicking the snow, all against a backdrop of this humbling solar spectacle. No! In photography, as life, when you’re given lemons you make lemonade, so I found myself balancing the composition, the exposure and, now, the added element of waiting for the silhouetted news team to be making the right shapes. This job always likes to keep you on your toes.
With politics, social care, environmental issues and now astral events covered, it was pretty much time to wrap up and head home. Greenland was an absolute pleasure to visit, providing experiences, memories and images that I will remember for a long time. I only hope that the current political tensions will be looked back on in years to come as being a quirk of the times rather than the beginning of yet more instability for a population already dealing with so much change.
