Olaf Otto Becker: Broken Line

The title refers to the Greenland coast, a section of which is printed on the book’s ice-blue cloth cover. This coast is both the jagged edge where icebergs break off prior to their southward journey, and – due not least to the power of the ice – it is furrowed by countless valleys and fjords. Becker used his camera to record the breaks in this line: scree fields, rounded weatherworn skerries, granite-grey and rust-red cliffs with a thin growth of lichen and moss, and, above all, icebergs of up to 60 kilometres in length, many a gleaming light blue, others smudged with grey from contact with the rock below, or white and jagged. Becker uses a plate camera – a slow, almost meditative working method vastly different from today’s quick digital snaps, but which produces impressively sharp images.

Becker’s pictures appear timeless. In reality, of course, they are anything but Greenland’s icebound wilderness, as we are continually reminded by climate campaigners’ alarming pictures, is one of the most rapidly changing landscapes on earth. And yet Becker wisely avoids clichés of the “nature on one side, evil humanity on the other” type. His pictures in this book reflect the statistical distribution of Greenland’s landscape: large amounts of ice and rock and few traces of humanity. Here and there, weather-beaten wooden huts, and still more their occupants’ possessions ranged around them, give an insight into the inhabitants’ way of life. Here, someone has left a drum kit complete with amplifier and loudspeakers out on his rickety wooden terrace; there, a slaughtered sled dog hangs on a balcony waiting to be skinned. Snowmobiles, but also three-wheelers and mountain bikes suggest that Greenlanders are used to travelling long distances. In this book, Becker shows us a single interior of a Greenland house. In the midst of the ice desert, this house with its stereo and computer, but also all kinds of bric-a-brac, from a porcelain polar bear to a plastic bouquet of tropical flowers, appears remarkably bourgeois – and also shows how similar the insides of our homes are worldwide in comparison with natural habitats. Above the dresser hangs an almost garishly kitsch painting of a lake with pine trees and pointed mountains peaks. As Olaf Otto Becker discovered during his travels, it shows the Königssee in Upper Bavaria.