Seven days of daylight

A week in Svalbard in May, when the sun circles the sky without setting. Mountains in the morning, walruses at ten at night and little auks after midnight, all in the same low light.

The Svalbard collection was made between 10 and 16 May 2024. In mid-May the sun never drops below the horizon this far north, so the light stays low and raking around the clock, and the hour on the clock stops meaning much.

The first frames were birds near the shore: eiders on the tundra beside a meltwater stream, and a barnacle goose swimming straight at the lens. The mountains came on 11 May, all at 600 mm.

A long lens flattens the mountain face until the bands of black rock and snow read as a pattern, the wall filling the whole frame.

Two Arctic terns rested on a slab of blue glacier ice on the afternoon of 13 May, one of them landing with its wings still raised. Both frames were made at 5:05 p.m., at 400 mm.

The fox kits were the last wildlife of the trip, on the morning of 16 May: two dark-coated littermates walking side by side on a mossy bank with the sun behind them, made at 1200 mm.

Upstroke, made on 13 May, is one of the three signature editions. All 24 photographs from the trip are in the Svalbard collection.