Mette Sandbye

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Photography as Cultural Critique or Ethno-Tourism?
- The Arctic Experience Through Art Photography
Mette Sandbye
The main issue for this conference is the role that photography has traditionally played in
representing ‘the other’. And as we all know photography has been a powerful tool in the
hands of the West, of anthropologists and other scientists, explorers, governments, the media
– especially in the process of colonialization. This has been a subject of study in academic
work since the 80’s – such as the work of Elizabeth Edwards – but has is been a subject
reflected by contemporary artists?
My main question in this paper will be: What is art photography’s place within the cultural,
historical and political discussion of post-colonial experience in the Arctic region? And a
sub-question: How do artists reflect critically on the idea of “representing the other”?
“Representing the Arctic experience” is an issue that has been almost invisible in the
international cultural discussion as compared to for example the Indian post-colonial
question. As you all know Denmark has a history of colonialization, and Greenland is a part
of Denmark – but rather few Danish artists have taken up this role in a critical and analytical
way.
I will exemplify my discussion on the critical role of art photography with two internationally
recognized Danish artists working with photography and representing an ‘ethnic’ problematic
centered around the Arctic region - Joachim Koester (born 1962) and Pia Arke (born 1958) –
and I’ll end up presenting a third artist, Charlotte Haslund-Christensen (born 1963), who has
taken the consequence of not being able to represent Greenland from the perpective of a
stranger. Both artists – Koester and Arke - discuss issues such as colonialization, Otherness
as related to both landscape and the native population, cold war fear, the failure of the
Utopias of Modernity, and the ethic and moral dilemmas involved in these issues. Comparing
the two artists one might ask: How can art photography deal with these complicated, political
- often traumatized - matters? Is there a limit to the possibility of the photograph to convey a
critical narrative? Does form follow content - or vice versa?

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Today many young artists combine straight photography and conceptual strategies, including
text, in a way that borrows from other disciplines such as anthropology. Social, political and
cultural criticism is again ‘hot’ among young artists as well as identifying with sexual, ethnic
or social minorities, and the critic willingly follows and expounds the ideas behind the work
as they are outlined by the artist. The idea of art as social critique is much too often taken for
granted by artists on the contemporary art scene and this critical self-understanding is not
questioned by the critic. I would say that quite a lot of work following this international
anthropological, sociological ‘art scene hype’ end up as exotic and aesthetic ethno-tourism
instead of a real cultural critique as it so desperately fights to be identified with.
The Arctic culture and experience has not really been a central issue within the contemporary
western art institution which is both sad and odd, since for example – and as I mentioned -
Greenland is a part of Denmark and Canada has a major Inuit population. If it has been dealt
with in art it has traditionally been in the form of an aesthetic worship of the exotic, the idea
of an Ultima Thule, the sublime wilderness on the borders of western civilization, only
sparsely populated with primitive, authentic people. The same image has been transmitted by
the history books, and from my childhood education I remember almost nothing about the
history and culture of Greenland, except from the images of a wasteland of ice and sealers
dressed in polar bear and seal skin. In the city squares of Copenhagen I could meet drunken
Greenlanders, but nothing in my cultural upbringing learned me to connect the two images.
Very few Danes have actually visited Greenland, both before and now. Our knowledge stems
from representation, and here photography has played an important role – but not much has
been written about the photographic representation of Greenland. In the History of Danish
Photography, which –as you all know – was published in 2004, Birna Kleivan wrote a
chapter on the photographic representation of Greenland, especially in the late 19.th and early
20 th Century, and the photographs I’ll show here comes from this chapter.
Photography at that time was understood within a largely unmediated, unquestioned realist
frame – these photographs were in general seen as neutral, unproblematic records of field
data – but it was through this photographic gaze that the Danes learned about Greenland. And
it was of course an instrumental gaze fused with and ideological and political discourse. The
images speak for themselves.

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However artists both within and outside the Arctic culture have recently started to deal with
these matters in a much more critical and conceptual way, especially Joachim Koester and
Pia Arke, as I will stick to Danish material. In the late 90’s Joachim Koester went to the
Arctic Northwest Canadian village Resolute to make a photo project named “Row Housing”
(1999/2000). Resolute was discovered in 1845 by an Arctic expedition led by Sir John
Franklin, which ended up by the ships, including Franklin and his 129 men, disappearing in a
storm, confirming the at that time reigning western image of the Arctic as a mysterious and
horrifying wasteland. Resolute was used as a cold war air base in the late 40’s, as a defence
post to shield off the Soviet Union. In the 50’s Canada was afraid to loose sovereignity over
the area to either Americans, Norwegians, Danes or Russians, so the place was inhabited by
Inuits, displaced from their homes in Quebec. It was named ‘a social experiment’, but of
course this relocation had tragic consequences for the Inuits. In 1970 the Anglo Swedish
architect Ralph Erskine was brought to the town to construct a modern model town, which in
its architecture should unite the town that was split between the Inuits and the Canadian
military people. The grandiose and utopic project was only realised on a very small scale and
then abandoned due to political and logistic problems.
This extremely interesting story about Resolute can be read in catalogue texts.
Koester’s photographs are shown on white museum walls with no text information. They
show the cultural wasteland of today, a fragile, slow-motion decay with remnants of both
Franklin’s expedition, the cold war air base, Erskine’s row house and the rather devastated
contemporary life. The project is conceptually grounded in a specific research on a specific
story, but these straight, aesthetic photographs tell a much more generalized story of a
wasteland between culture and nature not far from the story told by for example American
New Topography in the 70’s or the German Düsseldorfer photographers. The project needs
the critic to tell the background story in her review and thereby to transmit the specific
cultural critique. That is the problem of this otherwise interesting and important project, a
problem I often meet in contemporary art. Thus the project it is in danger of becoming mere
ethno-tourism.
Koester has also worked with material from Greenland. In “Nordenskiold and the Ice
Cap” (1999) he followed the route of the explorer Nordenskiold in 1870 documenting the
beautiful desertness of the Ice Cap in Greenland repeating his gaze and leaving the critical
interpretation to the viewer. In the installation “Message from Andrée”, made for the Venice
Biennial in 2005 he showed found footage, found many years after - in the 1930’s - from a

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mis-succeeded French balloon expedition to the Northpole in the late 19 th Century, this time
also with no text reflecting on the images.
From my point of view Koester’s conceptual projects is in danger of confirming our
visual image of the Arctic experience instead of making us reflect critically on it.
In a both similar and different way the photographer Pia Arke investigates almost the same
story as Koester does in Canada and Greenland, namely the story of the Danish
colonialization of Greenland and its consequences today. As half-native Greenlander who has
lived in Denmark since the age of twelve, she at the same time works with her own
background as a form of self therapy or auto-biography. The art of balancing between the
different identities and backgrounds is the subject of her art. Compared to Koester she has
followed the same themes and issues in all her career as an artist, and she has more and more
combined her photographs with other sorts of collected material and with text. One could call
her collected works a kind of mapping of the post-colonial, Greenlandish experience. She
shows how the colonial past creates a culturally fragmented subject and how the actual act of
remembrance can create new positions for being a subject. A lot of her work consist of
montages of appropriated photographs, both private family photographs and images from for
example books by Arctic explorers.
She also seeks out places outside Greenland that contain knowledge, such as for
example Danish museums and archives, in order to unfold the story that was told by the
colonizers and other outsiders.
Pia Arke uses inspiration from anthropological methods. In 2003 she published a
book project about her native town Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormit. It is Denmark’s most
northern post and populated by 600 people. The town is totally isolated and only twice a year
food and material is brought there by ship. Similarly to Koester’s story about Resolute this
town was artificially constructed in 1925 where 87 Inuits were transported 1000 kilometers
north to form a Danish post in the northeastern Greenland before the Norwegians claimed the
area. They didn’t know where they were going and why. The official story is that the Danish
government moved the people to prevent an over-population in Angmassalik, where they
came from. Today this isolated town suffers from heavy problems with alcohol,
unemployment, suicide, even murder. This story is more or less unknown both to the Danes
and to the local people of today. They don’t speak about it as they don’t speak about the
suicides. It is a town with no collective memory. She got the idea to make the book after
having read an article in a Greenlandish paper saying “Close the town with no future”.

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Pia Arke wanted to make the history of this town visible and recognized. She
interviewed both young and old people in the town, rephotographed their family photographs,
appropriated material from Danish archives, and sorted out the private stories of the nameless
people of the many archive photographs – also photographing the children of the first
population of the town today. Rather than a recovery of authenticity her work - since it is
done by an artist and not an anthropologist - represents a complex imaginative inventiveness,
where she - by circling around the same stories for many years - manages to articulate
general considerations about post-colonial experience at the same time as she digs out
specific and local stories that were never told.
Compared to Koester she also has the advantage that it is her own cultural
background that she investigates. Seeing her work altogether, it becomes clear to me that her
persistent way of combining the general and the specific avoids the risk of ethno-tourism and
becomes an important platform for a cultural articulation and hereby an understanding of the
contemporary Arctic experience.
My final visual example will be a work in progress that I have been allowed to show a little
part of by the Danish artist Charlotte Haslund-Christensen. She has travelled immensely
around the world, and some years ago she decided to do a work on contemporary everyday
life in Greenland. But after having traveled to Greenland several times she gave up the
project, realizing that she would always be the stranger, the intruder, the colonialist
representing ‘the other’. Instead she decided to reverse the colonial gaze and turn her camera
on her own culture: The Danes – concretely perturbed by racist stereotyping in contemporary
Denmark. She spent 2 years doing research in archives on anthropological photographic
representations of natives, of the other. Then she decided to use a conceptual framework for
her study of the Danish native, of what it means to be Danish. Her grandfather was a famous
explorer and amateur anthropologist in the first half of the 20 th Century, and she decided to
follow his footsteps, imitating his role and the way he – and other explorers and
anthropologists at that time – have photographed. Dressed as an explorer, with woolen
knickers, leather west, helmet etc., equipped with an expedition car, an assistant, and an
expedition box filled with maps, notebooks etc. she now departs on monthlong trips into the
Danish wilderness to photograph the natives she meets and to interview them of what it
means to be native (they are all born the same place as they now live), what it means to be
Danish, etc. In the project she exposes those who claim to know ‘the other’ to the limitations
and partiality of the photographic gaze on which that knowledge is based, subjecting ‘native’

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Danes to the scrutiny of the anthropological lens. A subversion of historical representation, a
reframing of photographic tropes, the project is a contemporary portrait not of Danish
society, but of the visual archive that has historically formed the basis of knowledge and
Western prejudice.
I want to stress that this is a work in progress. She let me borrow some of her expedition
photographs, but she has not yet decided the actual form of the work, that will not be show
until late 2007.
But I decided to end this talk by presenting her work as an example of another strategy to
critically reflect on this year’s theme of photographic representations of ‘the other’.