Apart from a tiny weather station, there’s feck all here – yet Hans Island has spent decades at the centre of a sometimes surreal territorial dispute.

In fits and starts of childish absurdity, perhaps rivalled only by the Rockall debacle, Hans Island – all 1.3 sq km of it – became Arctic tug-of-lovechild of Canada and Denmark. The two countries – Denmark through its ruling over Greenland – somehow how ended up fighting over this tiny place, spurred on by the media and nationalist sentiments – but recent reports are suggesting that they may carve up the island for once and for all.

Canada, has, for the better part of a century, claimed Hans Island, and therefore dominion over the local geology and resources; the International Court of Justice granted it the island to Greenland in 1933, and therefore Denmark claims it. Then, in the 80s, while both nations were signing an agreement to jointly protect the marine environment in the event of any resource exploitation, a Greenland-based historian bumped into an employee from Canadian Dome Petroleum employee wearing a hat – yes, a hat, with the words “Hans Island NWT” – Northwest Territories. The story broke into Greenlandic papers – it turned out that Dome, unknown to the politicans had been working on Hans Island. Holy war broke out. Not actual war.

Apparently – the story is semi-apocrayphal – for several years a back and forth spat followed, with Danish representives showing up to plant a flag and oddly, enough leaving a bottle of aquavit or cognac, both of which would be removed by a Canadian delegation some time later, and replaced by a Canadian flag and Canadian whiskey. The Danes are also said to have left a “Welcome to the Danish Island” sign for the Canadians

Zip forward to 2003-2004, when visits by both Danish and Canadian military to Hans Island resulted in more political twists and turns.Canadian defence minister, Bill Graham even visited the island in 2005, causing a diplomatic row to break out, and even a series of Google advertisements claiming the island for both nations, was disowned by the two administrations.

But in 2007, the Canadians finally admitted that the international border is halfway across the bloody 1.3-by-1.2 kilometre island. And in April 2012, National Post journalist Adrian Humphreys – said that Canada was “preparing to go halfsies on hans”. Looking at the Wikipedia entry about the island, it seems that while Humphreys has reported on Hans Island numerous times in the last decade, it’s seems that its his very articles that seem to have served to escalate the tension. No disrespect to Mr Humphreys – it seems that there’s been plenty of people out there willing to take umbrage or nationalistic stances.

His article from a few days ago quotes someone who really hits the nail on the head:

“The political complexities of making an announcement are, in many ways, much more complicated than settling the actual territorial dispute,” said Whitney Lackenbauer, associate professor of history at St. Jerome’s University.

A couple of absurdist organisations have sprouted up in response to it all – the Hans Island Liberation Front, which seems to be made up of two ‘residents’ of Hans Island, and are both called Hans.

With the North Pole under attack by the Reds, it is more important than ever that Santa Claus relocate to Hans Island. Otherwise the Soviets will take over Christmas gift delivery for the world, filling children’s stockings with old copies of Pravda, bottles of vodka, and spare parts for Ladas. Then they will remember that religion is the opiate of the masses and ban Christmas forever! Friends, we must not let this happen! The Russkie vodka must come directly to us! And as always, we need the company. We hope some of Santa’s elves are female. Even if they aren’t, just having Mrs Claus around would be nice.

… and Radio Free Hans Island:

“This is no time to panic” declared Hansian President for Life Stefan Simpson at his luxurious north shore retreat on a bullhorn from behind elegant walls of designer barbed wire and state of the art landmines. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong that we cannot fix. The facts are simple. I – that is – you, the Hans Island population, have simply spent more than I – that is you – have brought in lately. There will now follow a short period of rigidly defined doubt and uncertainty while the hard science of economics repositions our credit rating. Now go away or I’ll shoot”.

Hans island IS actualy named after a real Hans – Greenlandic Inuit Hans Hendrik, also known as Heindrich or Suersaq. To refer to Hendrik as an explorer might do him a disservice – he travelled with numerous European and American Arctic expeditions, pulled them out of trouble numerous times. His story is too amazing to do diservice to here.

Hans Island lies in the Kennedy Channel, part of Nares Strait, the body of water that cleaves the rocky shores between Ellesmere Island and northwestern Greenland. Not many people go here – in the past it was ill-prepared explorers and Inuit. Occasionally ships go by here now – I’ve heard it said that just 30 ships have been along here since World War II. Apparently, before 1948, only five ships were said to have navigated successfully north of Kane Basin. In 2009,the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise made the first known June transit into the Arctic Ocean – a month when the Strait should have been locked with ice.

What this is all about, sadly enough, is the search of oil. While Arctic nations may be starting to kiss and make up (or out?) over territorial fracas like Hans Island, the idea of anyone going to drill for oil in the High Arctic is appalling enough. Insurance giant Lloyd’s of London agree – this week the company put out a report penned by Chatham House Arctic expert Charles Emmerson, which according to The Guardian, highlights “huge potential environmental damage from oil drilling in the Arctic.”

Hans Island – Images by Dave Walsh

I’ve just found out today that, thanks to the team at Millennium Images, an image from my Bull Island series has been used as the cover of Tim Parks’ book, Teach Us to Sit Still. I have not read the book, or held a copy in my hand, but every review I’ve looked at today suggests that like my other recent book cover, Rebecca Solnit’s The Book of Migrations, I will be proud to have my photograph associated with Parks’ work.

According to the blurb:

“Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks.”

Teach Us to Sit Still on Tim Parks’ website
Teach Us to Sit Still on Amazon.com
Teach Us to Sit Still on Amazon.co.uk

Niall O’Leary and the team at Millennium Images in London, have created an online portfolio of my Arctic and Antarctic images under the banner of “The Cold Edge“. You can see the selection of images here, or read on for more:

I’ve written an artists statement to accompany the images:

I have succumbed to the draw of the Polar Regions; a slave to its unforgiving climate, the simple, savage food chain, the landscapes, seascapes and icescapes. The high Arctic and Antarctic still lie largely beyond the reach of most of us 7 billion, but not from the effects of our lifestyles – climate change and ocean acidification are just two of the threats driven by our spiraling use of fossil fuels.

It’s these concerns, along with the light and the infinite degrees of colour that lure me back; the harsh 24-hour glare of summer, the long shadows of morning and evening, and the dark sunless days of winter when the aurora and moon dictate the rules to photographers. I don’t enjoy the cold, but I love those grey days when the light is abundant and precise, refracted through the dense blue ice of glacier fragments. The iceberg blues defy both imagination and the senses, leaving me with nothing but my images as testimony to my experience.

I’m told my images emanate a quiet tension; perhaps my passion for nature and the polar zones is tempered with my unease that all may not be right in the Garden of Eden. We humans are only starting to grasp how we are fouling our own nest, and how our daily behaviour has repercussions elsewhere. It’s a small world, after all.

The Cold Edge – Images by Dave Walsh

Based in London, Millennium Images holds more than 30,000 contemporary photographic art images by over 600 photographers, representing the best in contemporary photography.Visit Millennium Images website.

The Millennium images website reads:
“Dave Walsh is a photographer, writer and environmental campaigner from Wexford, in the south east of Ireland. With an interest in human interaction with the natural environment, Walsh has sailed on board numerous Greenpeace expeditions to far-flung places, including several trips to the Arctic and Antarctic, where he has produced a number of breathtaking images.”

“In December 2011, Dave is traveling to northern Finland to make photographs – where the sun will have already set for the year.”

A portfolio of five of my photographs has been featured in issue four of the excellent Irish photography magazine The Shot. A big thanks to editors Karl and John who are masterminding the project; each issue showcases five photographers with five images each, and five hundred words to talk about themselves and their photography. The current issue includes an interview with Anthony Haughey

For my portfolio, The Shot selected a combination of images from the Arctic – a polar bear and walrus; and the Antarctic – a majestic iceberg, juxtaposed with industrial images. The relief drilling rigs at the site of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and closer to home, the twin smoke stacks of the iconic Poolbeg electricity generation station in Dublin. There’s a theme at work here, of course – our hunger for resources, and the related threat of climate change.

You can view Issue 4 of The Shot here… and the main website of The Shot here.

Here’s The Shot selection:

The Shot Selection

In all my years as a writer, I’ve written many book reviews. But I’ve never before reviewed a book that uses one of my photographs as its cover. I’m talking about The Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, by Rebecca Solnit, which has been a joy to read, and an honour to become connected with. I was unaware of Solnit’s work until May 24th of this year, when I read her insightful article the Strauss-Kahn affair, colonisation and the IMF: Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite. That afternoon, I received an email from Bob Bhamra, of Verso Books, asking me if he could use my image of the Burren for a new editon of The Book of Migrations. Serendipity. We cut a deal.

A couple of months pass, and a copy of The Book of Migrations arrives. I take it with me on a train from Amsterdam to Perpignan, and fall in love with the text. Solnit’s book is an exploration of the nature of being, place and travel, overlaying a real, physical itinerary around Ireland. First published in 1997, it talks of an Ireland that existed then, Irelands that are long gone, and Irelands that will go on existing and evolving. The author never slips into the obsequiousness that haunts many Irish-American writers – on the contrary, her prose, and her understanding of the transient subtleties and cultural inconsistencies of any country – in this case Ireland – make her a trustworthy commentator. Solnit not only has a deep reach when it comes to historical and cultural knowledge, she has the craft and perspective to draw together and connect the multiple patterns she has observed.

As Solnit walks the roads of Ireland, through Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo, she muses on the issues that, despite the expectations of visitors – especially – Irish Americans, Ireland is a fixed pin in place and time, a constantly shifting concept, and like a fractal, the closer you look, the more detail emerges. Like distance. It’s something I’ve long felt about Ireland – for a tiny country, it’s very very big. When you’re used to crossing our island, talks by Americans or Australians, or mainland Europeans of six or eight hour drives are unfathomable. I’ve driven Sydney to Melbourne in day, sailed by ship across the equator and towards both poles, yet a one hour drive in Co. Clare can provide more distraction than a marathon journey across some larger land. I’m forever dissuading foreign visitors of the assumption that an Irish 100km can be breached within a mere standard hour. They scorn me, then turn up hours late, laden with yarns of sheep and cattle and pubs and bad directions.

As Solnit writes:

“On my previous trip my sense of scale had veered wildly shaped as it is by continental and interstate scale: I would look at a place on the map and say We can’t go there, it’s all the way across the country, the realize the country was hardly a hundred and fifty miles across, only a few hours on a straight highway, and finally find that the slow winding roads of the countryside keep the island large after all, in a way that has nothing to do with notions of objective scale. The roads had been built not for long-distance travel, but to connect the dots of adjoining towns, and they do so in a serpentine lines that writhe even more to accommodate the steep terrain of the west.”

Through her travels Solnit touches on the bizarre Dublin Dead Zoo, the butterfly legacy of Roger Casement, the pirate queen Grace O’Malley, Sweeney – a king destined to live as a bird amongst the trees, the Dublin of James Joyce and Leopold Bloom the Irish Traveller culture, the deforestation of Ireland, the Great Famine and the subsequent decades of emigration, The Destruction Of Da Derga’s Hostel, tourism, travel and oral culture:

“At least for outsiders much of Ireland’s charm is that it is still, however literate, an oral culture. Talk is a principal form of entertainment and art, and internal memory hasn’t been entirely eclipsed by recorded history or amnesia. Storytelling itself has been in long decline elsewhere, in part because the generations are all but segregated in most industrial societies, because a tale requires a leisurely pace for both tell and listeners, and because telling has been replaced by commercial entertainment. The appetite for stories seems undiminished, but the information and entertainment media have evolved to fill it with narratives in which the listener is forever inaudible and invisible, never the teller or part of the tale. These sources don’t really replace firsthand stories, which cast their glow over the events and places of one’s own life, incorporate one into a community of meanings.”

Apart from our photographic & literary crossover, Solnit’s wanderings – both geographical and philosophical – seem to intersect my own. My photograph on the cover of The Book of the Migrations the Burren, in Co. Clare shows the clints and grikes of the limestone karst, the positive-negative, +/_ wave forms of the frozen stone. Romantically assumed to be a barren, desolate and hostile landscape, the Burren (boireann, meaning stoney place) is anything but – farms and hundreds of bronze age stone forts are sprinkled throughout the landscape. Dozens of species of orchids grace the landscape, and Alpine and Mediterranean grow alongside each other. Wild goats, viviparous lizards and slow worms, foxes and ravens makes their homes here.

I may be a Wexfordman, but with a Galway mother, my heart is firmly on the west coast. Co. Clare, while it may lack the serious mountain ranges of Kerry or Galway, is a magical place – a county of musicians and storytellers and matchmakers, where the routing of a dual carriageway close to a fairy tree causes havoc. The veil is thin in Co. Clare, between this world and the next – the only other place in Ireland I have this profound sense is Sligo.

I made the Burren photograph in the summer of 2006, while working on a migration of my own – I had decided to up sticks and move from Dublin city centre to the surf town Lahinch. I spent a weekend checking out houses in the area, and ended up on the Green Road across the Burren with my notorious accomplice Damien, where I made the Burren photograph. The image ended up in my online library, waiting for its day, until discovered by Bob, from Verso and progressed to gracing Rebecca Solnit’s book.

Next week, early October 2011, I’ll be hiking through the ancient oak forests of Co. Kerry, to witness the autumn rut of the red deer. Solnit too describes her experiences in the woods around Killarney, and I hope I can return with images to match her prose.

A Book of Migrations
Verso Books: A Book of Migrations
A Book of Migrations on Amazon.com
A Book of Migrations on Amazon.co.uk

See my original image of Burren Clints and Grikes »

Two Arctic Terns fight off a Long Tailed Skua by a blue iceberg in Kongsfjord, near the Arctic scientific research base of Ny-Alesund, Svalbard. Another picture that’s evaded discovery for over a year – I love how the battle between the birds lends scale to the improbable blue of the iceberg. You can view more of my iceberg images here »

© 2010 Dave Walsh – All Rights Reserved

Interested in a print? Please contact me.
View large version

Arctic Tern, sterna paradisea, hovering near the dog yard Ny Alesund, Svalbard. Arctic terns migrate more than any other species bird – up to 35,000km per year for some birds, as the travel to Antarctica and back, and can enjoy two polar summers. The terns nest in the tundra in the scientific research centre of Ny Alesund, where they lay eggs, and tend to attack passersby in self-defence.

This is one of those gems that turn up more than a year after the images is made, missed during some hurried edit. I was searching in a folder from the 2010 trip to Svalbard when I found this lovely image. View it large »

Photographing flowers and undwear at the Keukenhof

Photographing People, Photographing flowers. An ugly, and probably mildly tasteless set of images, where I photograph people photographing flowers, and often show off their backsides along the way. Images made on April 2011 at the Keukenhof tulip show at Lisse, Netherlands.

I was visiting what claims to be world’s largest flower garden with my mother and girlfriend – playing tourist. Camera out, not expecting masterpieces, perhaps to intercept some interesting scene. I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the crowds, dressed in multi-coloured outfits to celebrate the seven million tulips planted in the Keukenhof each spring. Neither was I prepared to be caught in the digital camera crossfire as visitors took thousand upon thousand of snapshots of flowerbeds, or themselves with tulips, destined for imprisonment on a hard disk somewhere, or perhaps an appearance their Facebook profile. There seemed to be a relentless drive to capture endless, context-less images of the too-perfect, uniform, and altogether not very natural domestic tulips. I have never, ever, seen a field of wildflowers being trampled by hundreds of hassled, stressed tourists searching for the perfect souvenir shot. And perhaps I never will.

I forgot about shooting ‘straight’ images, and instead started shooting like a street photographer. Despite the vegetation, the Keukenhof, on a Sunday in April, is a very urban environment. I photographed people photographing each other, photographing flowers, showing off their blue-jeaned, boxer-shorted backsides as they snapped images. I stole images of their solemnity, their stress and the kitsch hell of it all. My few hours at the Keukenhof put me in mind of the original Tulip Mania bubble in the 17th century. IT got so crazy that one Dutch Viceroy tulip bulbs could apparently fetch 2,500 Florins, at a time when when a skilled labourer might only make 150 Florins in an entire year.

There’s more of the Keukenhof madness in the slideshow below, or view the gallery.

People, Photographing Flowers – Keukenof Tulip Show – Images by Dave Walsh

Transocean Development Driller rigs in squall at Deepwater Horizon disaster site.

It has taken not much more than half a century to turn the Gulf of Mexico into an Urban Ocean, dotted with 27,000 abandoned wells, and nearly 4,000 active platforms, interconnected by an incredible 40,000km of pipelines. At sea, no matter where you are in the northern Gulf of Mexico, you can see the blinking lights of an oil platform, a small steel city unto itself, or perhaps a rusting ghost town. The Deepwater Horizon disaster, in April 2010 drew attention to this industrialisation of the Gulf, and hinted to the public the existence a scarred landscape that exists just over the horizon from the shorelines of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. In September 2010, I worked on board a Greenpeace ship carrying out research to measure the impact of the oil spill, from where I got to observe the oil rigs drafted into the Deepwater Horizon site dwarfed by powerful rainstorms, and the wildlife that still prevails – the hummingbirds, the sperm whales, the flying fish and the powerful rainstorms.

Deepwater Horizon & Gulf of Mexico – Images by Dave Walsh

Watch the slideshow large »

I’m pleased to see that one of my Tasmanian Devil pictures has shown up in May/June edition of Sierra Club magazine, in an article called Sympathy for the Devils. UPDATE June 28th: This image has also been used by New Scientist article, “Tasmanian devils were sitting ducks for deadly cancer”.

Following on from some photographs I shot in 2008, I returned to Tasmania in November 2009, and went into the field with scientists who are working on conserving Tasmanian Devils, in light of the spread of a contagious cancer, known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease which continues to decimate the population in many parts of the island.

Here’s some more images of tassie devils, and the places I visited:

See my full collection of Tasmanian Devil photographs

For more information about Tasmanian Devils, and the facial tumour disease, visit http://www.tassiedevil.com.au/

Many thanks to Adina LoBiondo at Sierra magazine for choosing my devil!

My friend, distant cousin and co-conspirator Barry Kavanagh has seen fit to use my portrait of him – made on the fly one night in Dublin’s Long Hall pub, on the cover of the new Dacianos album, Fables for Another Time.

From the sleeve of Fables for Another Time

Quantum Suicide is a scientific thought experiment. The scientist sits in front of a gun that is set up to either trigger or misfire, depending on the decay of a radioactive atom. With each run of the experiment, there is a 50% chance the gun will trigger. Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the gun will eventually kill the scientist. But if the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation is correct, then at each run of the experiment there will be a universe in which the scientist lives, and another in which he dies. The scientist can only ever be conscious of the world in which he LIVES, and so never seems to die. This leads to the fanciful speculation that the many-worlds interpretation implies all conscious beings are immortal.
(Imagine the scientist, realizing he cannot die, stepping outside the lab and seeing for the first time what is worthwhile about existence).

Dacianos – Quantum Suicide.wav by Barry Kavanagh

Read more and buy the album on the Dacianos website »

The photograph of Barry stems from our furthering of an Irish stereotype – he, Damien and I were sitting in The Long Hall pub, in Dublin, Christmas 2010. Here’s a few more images from that night:

The Long Hall, December 2010 – Images by Dave Walsh

A recent addition to Dublin’s low-rise skyline and spanning the Irish capital’s River Liffey, the harp-like silhouette of Santiago Caletrava’s Samuel Beckett Bridge is a technical marvel bordering in Celtic Kitsch. These qualities attracted me and my camera – even to the point of doing long picture exposures on cold snowy nights. It’s paid off, with several of my images of the bridge now being used by Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE, for a Lyric FM CD compilation of Irish harp music.

From the RTE website:

Ireland is the only country in the world with a musical instrument as its national emblem. The symbol of the harp is everywhere: on our coins, passports, tax demands and even on the pint glass. It is probably one of our most enduring and recognisable images and today there are more professional harpers and students of our national instrument than ever before.
Masters of the Irish Harp (produced in association with Cairde na Cruite) is the latest release from RTÉ lyric fm and it celebrates the virtuosity of sixteen of our leading harpers playing music ranging from solo harp tunes collected at the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792 right up to compositions created in the twenty-first century for harp, trumpet and guitar.

Classical.ie: Masters of the Irish Harp »

Here’s the album sleeve, and parts of the inner booklet. Thanks to Eoin Brady for sharing these with me, and for choosing to work with me on this project.

Here’s more images of the bridge:

Samuel Beckett Bridge, Dublin – Images by Dave Walsh

Age and youth - walker and graffiti door on Sloterkade, Amsterdam.

Age and youth – walking aid and graffiti door on Sloterkade, Amsterdam. This scene has been fascinating me for months. The stairs, with the hint of a white rail, an elderly person’s walking aid locked to the wall, a garage door covered in unintelligible graffiti, the growth of the green plant. The blue of some of the spraypaint matches the walker, while the word ‘suicide’ appears on the glass above. The word again, again and again.

Herbs in the window of abandoned Herbalist Shop

An abandoned herbalist’s shop in Rethymno, Crete. It was owned, apparently, by Panajiotis and or Dimitrios Kontogianis – at least that’s what it says on the packets of dried herbs in the window. Other fragments of clues – a faded, stained photograph of the proprieter, leftover belongings. What happened here? Where did they go?

I found The Herbalist’s shop in a very touristy part of Rethymno. After days of isolation in the hills, we found ourselves trying to escape the endless ratruns of tourist shops in Rethymno’s old town. Our attempted escape down graffiti-filled back alleys had thrown us onto yet another claustrophobic highway of reasonably-high-quality products. But amongst the olive oil soap and African wood carvings stood one derelict corner shop. I spent just a few minutes outside, peering in the windows, my camera lens finally coming to rest on an image of the aproned Herbalist. Where is he gone?

View BIG slideshow gallery of images

The Herbalist – Images by Dave Walsh

This imag of a “Ribbed Iceberg”, in Kangerdlussuaq Fjord, East Greenland, from on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in 2009, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Extreme Environment competition, run by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, in Hobart, Australia.

The Extreme Environment Photographic Exhibition brings together some of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring images from the Arctic and the Antarctic, as professional and amateur photographers compete for one of the richest prizes in Australian photography.

Click here to see the shortlisted images – mine is 9th from the end of the slideshow. You can also login and vote for it, in the People’s Choice Award, before May 13th.

Bust of Lenin in Barentsburg, Svalbard

I am staring at a forest, a painting of a forest. A door opens in the forest, and two men climb out. They close the door, then walk away.

The forest, or rather the painting of a forest, is in the Russian coal-mining town of Barentsburg, about 1200km from the North Pole, one of three inhabited settlements in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

There are no trees in Svalbard. But there are pictures of trees, billboard size, to remind the miners of the forests back home.

My visit to Barentsburg was short, far too short. I only stayed 97 minutes. I am not proud of this. I arrived as a tourist, and didn’t want to leave. At least not soon.

I took no time to make new friends, gained no valuable insights into what it is like to live there. I didn’t hit the bar, like some of the other visitors, to sample the vodka. I didn’t even buy a Putin, Yeltsin, or Gorbachev matryoshka doll.

I did see a metal sunflower, a homemade spaceship, an awful lot of kittiwakes and two men walking out of a painting of a forest.

View gallery of 97 Minutes in Barentsburg

In any case, there were not many people around to talk to, and those that passed along the pitted, concrete main street didn’t spare much attention for the summer blow-ins. Living in Svalbard means putting up with a polar night that lasts from early November until the end of January, and temperatures of -50C. Milksop daytrippers are hardly worth consideration.

In fairness, I didn’t go all the way to the Arctic for a tourism spree; I stole a day off after a two-month expedition further north. I had been the press officer on board the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, campaigning against industrial threats to the Arctic and studying marine biodiversity and the effects of CO2 pollution on our oceans through ocean acidification. The trip had taken us along the sublime coast of Svalbard, and the scientific research station at Ny Alesund.

This was my second consecutive summer in the Arctic, but not my first trip to Svalbard, the ‘Cold Edge’, a mysterious land of polar desert and ice. I fell in love with as a child, just by reading about it, this land with just 2,500 people and considerably more polar bears. Since 2009, when I arrived on a ship from Greenland, I had learned to love Svalbard more; the undomesticated, almost barren landscape, inhabited by bears, and foxes and reindeer, meets a coast of fjords and walrus and belugas. There are no roads, outside the main town of Longyearbyen. You don’t leave town without a high-powered rifle, and the know-how and the stomach to use it – and to avoid using it – if you run into a polar bear interested in eating you.

Barentsburg, named after 16th century Dutch explorer William Barentz, is home to about 500 of Svalbard’s people, mostly Russians and Ukrainians who work at Arktikugol’s coal mine, or provide services to support it. There more people, about 2000, I understand,, but the coal mine’s production and competitiveness declined over the years. An air tragedy and several mining accidents haven’t helped.

Barentsburg had appeared on the horizon every time I sailed into Longyearbyen, a puff of smoke from its power station seen against snow-covered mountains. I had seen pictures, read stories of an improbable kitsch relic of Soviet pride at the top of the World. So, with a day free, I took a daytrip on a tourist ship.

With the little ship drawing towards Barentsburg’s wharf, I view town through my telephoto lens. Boarded-up and sooty wood houses. Decrepit piles of discarded machinery equipment. On the mountainside, some words in Cyrillic. I later learn reads “peace on earth”. Not a human to be seen, until a young, tough-looking woman appears, wearing stonewashed jeans. She’s our guide, and we follow her up the 220 wooden steps to the main street – an ambling, pitted concrete artery running across the town. More boarded up houses. An industrial looking child’s swing, perhaps once belonging to the Russian ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya. She is said to have lived in the adjacent house in the 1930s, when her father was Barentsburg‘s Head of Mines. Farther up, a massive, closed down building, with an intriguing sign saying “Cafe-Bar 78 Parallel” – referring to Barentsburg’s latitude. This clearly was the place to be on a Friday night, once upon a time.

The day is sunny, which lends some magic to the shabby colours of the buildings. Anywhere there’s soil or loose ground, it’s stained black with coal dust. When the wind kicks up, I can feel the dust in my eyes and on my skin. Three large murals on billboards, two of them showing bucolic forest scenes. A shop and museum with a hearty Soviet-style mural of miners above. Another mural, showing a miner being embraced by two polar bears, each holding a Norwegian or Russian flag. Improbable.

I slip away from our guide, who, to her credit, is incredibly proud of the place and has been pointing out landmarks in lengthy detail. She moves on, with the entourage. I fall in love with afternoon light; the run-down town square, the resolute Lenin bust, the abandoned apartments now colonized and shit-strewn by armies of squawking kittiwakes. On one of the many overcast Svalbard days, Barentsburg could be a depressing place. But today I love it. I wonder how if I’d feel the same after weeks, or months.

Some young, expressionless women in leather coats walk past. I nod a hello, but they ignore me. Some dark, hard faced men walked past. They smile, then shift attention at the young tourist women up ambling along up ahead.

There’s a tiny wooden church across the overgrown, crumbling town square. It’s in the style of Pomors, a seafaring, hunting people who came to Svalbard from Russia in the distant past. The church, I learn, is dedicated to the 141 people who died in a plane crash here in 1996 – miners and their families – and to 23 miners who died here the following years. Barentsburg may amuse me, but it has a disproportionally sad past.

I climb higher on the main street, and off it, to where a proud bust of Lenin stands, backed up a mural showing the islands of Svalbard. Across the way, modern apartment blocks, one with a huge mural of a woman in traditional clothes; in between, one of the roughest soccer pitches I have ever seen. And I’ve seen a few. I follow some tourists up some steps and into a building. Turns out to be the hotel, which also has a post office souvenir shop, selling all manner of post-Soviet tat –Russian dolls, Lenin pins. It’s thronged with my fellow travellers. I photograph the impeccably empty, clean, institutional green cloakroom, then leave, skipping the tourists vodka-sipping in the hotel bar.

Main St dips away down hill here, towards the mines. Time is slipping away. I work my way back towards the 220 steps, pausing for a closer look at the propeller-driven space-car thing overlooking the sea. I see other daytrippers draining towards the port. I try to slow time down by photograph other things – houses, murals, churches, anchors, shipping containers, cranes. I see a man welding, another climbing into an ancient red UAZ 452 Bukhanka ‘loaf’ van before I embark.

From on board, I can see the last few stragglers approach. Our guide is standing facing away from the ship, apparently gazing into space. She appears to be posing beside the giant rusting crane, then turns and admonishes the latecomers, casts us off, and throws us a wave.

I skip through the images on my camera. Between first setting foot on concrete, and returning to the ship: 97 minutes. Not long enough to truly experience any town.

Contact for me details on publishing these images, or buying prints »

All text © 2011 Dave Walsh. All Barentsburg images © 2010 Dave Walsh.

For a couple of years now, actress and filmmaker Martha Van Der Bly and myself have been threatening to team up and work on a photographic project together. Great idea, but hindered by our never being in the same location for more than five minutes. Back in April, we spent two Sunday afternoons developing some ideas…

Here’s what we created:

Martha Van Der Bly – Images by Dave Walsh

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From Martha’s website: “Martha has teamed up with Irish photographer Dave Walsh for an imaginative new photo shoot, inspired by Roman Polanksi’s film ‘Repulsion’. In the photo series “Rue de Paradis, Paris”, Martha takes on the role of Anezka, a Czech fashion designer, who lives with her sister in Paris. When her sister leaves for a holiday with her married boyfriend Jean-Paul, Anezka is left behind. On her own… in Rue de Paradis, Paris”

Martha Van Der Bly »

I don’t doubt that I often make pictures of strange objects – but it’s a little bizarre to see one’s image turn up in a book like Christopher Salyers’ Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism, published by Mark Batty.

Not that I’m surprised – Christopher contacted me about using the picture back last May, just after I’d uploaded my photograph of a somewhat customised photo booth by the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Now the book is out, full of weird and wonderful vending machines around the world. My favourite fact – there’s one vending machine for every twenty-three people in Japan! Nice work, Christopher…

Bull Island is a new world, less than 200 years old. Grown from a mere sandback after Captain William Bligh (of the Bounty) made his 1801 proposal to stop the silting of the Liffey by constructing of the Bull Wall, the island is today a UNESCO biosphere reserve – a protected area that by definition is supposed to demonstrate a balanced relationship between man and nature.

I’ve been developing an ambitious project that questions the precarious balance between use and misuse of Bull Island.

Brent geese migrate there from the Arctic; golfers, walkers, kitesurfers and boyracers arrive from the surrounding city. However, the very currents that bring the sand also washes ashore human detritus; and humans appear to transport other unwanted items to bull island in the backs of cars or vans.

On my visits to Bull Island, I began finding juxtapositions of discarded household items, seemingly placed in the landscape by an elusive surrealist flytipper. I began to question our relationship with Bull Island, a microcosm of how we regard our world at large.

While the long-term plan for my work will cover more than found objects, the included images are mostly from one segment, titled The Things I Found on Bull Island. While this segment will undoubtedly continue to develop (it may take years as I am not in Ireland much these days!), I also would like to make a series of early morning visits to Bull Island to track down both the human and other wildlife that prowl its shores at dawn. I’m going to interview and photograph key people who live or work on the island, and document our diverse and complicated relationship with the island, as a place loved and unloved.

The Things I Found on Bull Island – Images by Dave Walsh

This story was first posted as a blog on the Greenpeace Climate blog in August 2009 – while I was on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, off the coast of Greenland as part of a four month expedition investigating climate impacts in the Arctic.

It’s five minutes past midnight on board the Arctic Sunrise, August 2nd, 2009. The sun never sets at this time of year; instead it casts long late shadows on the ice, and turns the sea water and icebergs buttery yellows and infinite blues.

Some of us should be asleep, but few of us are – we’re pulled up beside a stunning iceberg, which has become known as ‘The Donut’, thanks to the circular hole formed by an exquisite archway of glacier ice.

I’m on the starboard bridge wing, looking at the Sunrise’s shadow play on the ‘berg, then reflection of that shadow in the water. Out of the corner of my eye I catch something yellow galloping along the pockmarked sea ice that stretches from the iceberg to the nearby coastal cliffs.

“POLAR BEAR, POLAR BEAR” I shout into the bridge.

The bridge erupts into a frenzy of activity.

I stick my head back outside. The bear has stopped, maybe 50m off the starboard bow.

Nanuk or Nanoq, the Inuit name for the polar bear or ice bear. Also known as Ursus maritimus, the sea bear. In northwestern Greenland, the Polar Inuit call the bear Pisugtooq; the great wanderer. To follow a bear, it is said, is to really learn something. I like what Pisugtooq means, but Nanuk rolls off my tongue a little easier.

Nanuk is sitting down, waving its head back and forth as it sniffs the aroma of humans and cooking that’s coming from the big green ship. Polar bears are curious animals, and it’s a fair guess that it has never laid its brown eyes on a ship before – not many ships have ever reached these waters. I don’t know if it’s a male or female. I’d hazard a guess of male, but not from any solid evidence. Kieran forwarded me an new story earlier about a Japanese zoo where keepers spent six months trying to get two polar bears to mate, before discovering they were both female.

Out of the bear’s line of sight, on the other side of the ship, we’ve a boat in the water, with Bob, Sarah, Eric, Alun and Stephen on board. They quickly choose to evacuate the boat, and get back on board the Sunrise safely. Up on around the bridge, Nick is to my left, shooting photographs on his telephoto lens. Stephen, still in his boat suit, joins the others on the bow with his video camera.

The bear moves forward, wading knee deep through a meltpool. It strides confidently up to the ship sniffing the air, and looking up at the little people above. Its massive forelegs are awe inspiring, ending in paws bigger than my head – these act as paddles, snowshoes, and seal-killing tools, thanks to huge reddish brown claws on each foot.

Nanuk’s coat glows golden yellow in the low sunlight. It’s commonly assumed that polar bears are as white as snow – not so. Instead, their fur – each hair of which is hollow, for insulation, is creamy if not yellow.

Now Nanuk is regarding the bow of the Arctic Sunrise with something more than curiosity. The deck that people are standing on is 4m above the ice, sloping outwards. Including the gunwale, the bear is looking up at about 5m of steel, sloping out over its head. It can’t be seriously thinking of jumping onto the ship, can it? I imagine the Arctic Sunrise arriving into port, with a pair of cartoon scratch marks descending to the waterline from an attempted ursine boarding.

Nanuk seems to blink, change its mind, sniffs around a bit. I’m standing on the next deck up, so I’m close to 9m from the ice, or probably less than 8 from the bear’s head. I’m looking through my 400mm camera lens at its muzzle, which is stained red, presumably from the blood of seals. Nanuk looks back up the lens at me, the sunlight catching its eye as it regards my clicking camera with cold curiosity. Even with that much vertical height between myself and the bear, I am unnerved.

A sudden movement from from a crewmate below startles Nanuk, who spins away, splashing back into the water. The minor panic subsides, and it climbs on to the ice again. Then, showing only its right side, sits on its haunches, giving the Arctic Sunrise a doleful over-the-shoulder look. Then it stretches its back ramrod straight and aims its muzzle at the blue sky above.

I almost expect the bear to start howling. Instead, it seems to have turned itself into an olfactory antennae, getting its nose as high as possible. It looks dumpy – plump around its nether regions, like a bear wearing a bear suit to a fancy dress party. But Nanuk also looks graceful, regal, and at ease in its domain, and now, with its snout in the air, seems to have reached a kind of shamanic pose.

Nanuk’s forepaws come down on the ice again, and it starts ambling away. Without warning, it drops down on the snow, and spends the next two minutes rolling around on its back like a playful dog on a lawn, kicking its legs into the air, rubbing its fur onto the snow. Is it trying to cool down after all the excitement or drying its fur? Is it declaring its submission to the big green rainbow monster by proffering its furry belly? Or is it simply having a good time and wants to show off to the cameras?

After a few minutes of this, Nanuk sits up, looking a bit dazed and selfconscious, before wandering off across the ice. We continue watching through binoculars and telephoto lenses. A dark lump can been on the ice, between the bear and the cliffs of Cape Clay. It seems to be a ringed seal, pulled up on the ice.

Nanuk goes into stealth mode. We have problems telling the bear’s pale hump from the sunlit ice as it takes a winding route through the water towards the seal. We blink, and the seal vanishes. Nanuk appears, forepaws on the ice flow, sniffing the air, disappointed. Then it wanders off, in search of new adventures, and a late supper.

The ship’s engines start, and we leave. The is the bear’s territory, and we do not want to impose further.

-Dave

Footnote: This was the fifth of six polar bears we’ve seen since June 29th. The 1st was on the Arctic Sea ice, as written about by Melanie. We later saw a mother and two cubs in the distance on Petermann Glacier. Since the above encounter, Martin, Stefan and Geert saw a polar bear from the helicopter, clambering about on one of the McGarry Islands.

Photos: Dave Walsh

Polar Bears – Images by Dave Walsh

See the full set of Polar Bear photographs »

Dave Walsh Photo on Twitter
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Greenpeace Climate blog
Late Night with Nanuk
Arctic Impacts
Greenpeace Arctic Twitter feed
Expedition photos
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