After his breathtaking, prize-winning photographs of the coast of Greenland in Broken Line, Olaf Otto Becker (*1959 in Travemünde) turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero.
Second only to Antarctica, Greenland has the most expansive continental ice sheet in the world. Becker’s spectacular portraits of this region are taken with a cumbersome and heavy large-format camera during physically strenuous, sometimes life-threatening tours among glacial crevasses and snowmelt flows. His photographic studies reveal the overwhelming beauty of this ice-covered landscape while at the same time documenting the existential threat to it, for even here, in this completely uninhabited region, human influences have fatal consequences: dust and soot in the air form black, crusty deposits that, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets—with no doubt unavoidable catastrophic results.