Between Darkness & Light: Capturing Life Beyond the Arctic

longyearbyen_w_przeddzien_8_marca_fot_ilona_wisniewska.jpg, full-width, Longyearbyen, photo: Ilona Wiśniewska

By means of word and camera, Ilona Wiśniewska has been bringing the furthest reaches of Norway and Greenland closer to Polish readers for over a decade. How does she manage to translate the indolent realm of the North into an enthralling story brimming with magic?

Five acts of the North

First there was Białe. Zimna wyspa Spitsbergen (White: The Cold Island of Spitsbergen), a book of wonder and enchantment. Ilona Wiśniewska beheld the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic for the first time in the summer of 2009, and a year later she settled in Longyearbyen, the largest settlement. She was just starting to study the language, the cold and the loneliness. She was slowly getting to know the local customs, although she mainly met other people like her – outsiders. She had to work out the instruction manual herself. She published her first literary reportage in 2014 from a place where ‘it’s easy to forget that the world is elsewhere’.

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‘Autoportret’ by Ilona Wisniewska, © Ilona Wiśniewska; ‘Białe. Zimna wyspa Spitsbergen’ by Ilona Wiśniewska, book cover, photo: Czarne Publishers

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The third unveiling of the North is Lud. Z grenlandzkiej wyspy (Folk: From a Greenland Island), a story of being between and among. Wiśniewska worked for three months as a volunteer in Greenland’s oldest orphanage. There, she collected stories, giving a part of herself in return each time. Although she was a stranger to the inhabitants of the world’s largest island, she already knew, after years of living in Norway, how to shorten this distance. She was better able to recognise when to be silent or to withdraw. This allowed for a story to emerge from the silence.

Then came Hen. Na północy Norwegii (Beyond: In the North of Norway), a story to be listened to. Slightly more than had White, it looked to the past to facilitate an understanding of the here and now. It was also rougher, unhurried, centred around three main themes: the story of a ninety-year-old man inextricably linked to the Finnmark region; a Saami identity and the unequal treatment of the indigenous people of the North; as well as life in the Norwegian-Russian borderlands. The reporter has encapsulated the essence of this in a book whose title in Norwegian means ‘simultaneously far and near’.

Next up was Migot. Z krańca Grenlandii (Glimmer: From the Edge of Greenland), a literary image drawn out from within. After a few years, the author returned to Greenland but shifted her gaze to a different part of the island – that inhabited by the Inughuit. The storylines developed in the previous book finally found their conclusion. The new ones turned out to be enriched by the experience of the previous stories – the persistent looking-out and listening-in was supplanted by patience and acceptance. More open to otherness, Glimmer shows how Wiśniewska was learning to take her time, to be there for real, not for a moment.

In addition, there is also a novel for younger readers, Przyjaciel Północy (Friend of the North). Norway seen once again, and as if for the first time, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. What promises to be a lackadaisical trip to visit his aunt, who lives on Spitsbergen, turns into a fascinating adventure in which life is at stake. Familiar places, characters and problems are this time stylishly dressed up in fiction but nonetheless evoke reality.

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‘Przyjaciel Północy’ by Ilona Wiśniewska, cover & illustration, photo: Agora children’s publishers

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Then there are the photographs from the North accompanying this endless journalistic tale. Photographs of specific houses, though the places remain unspecified, of characters known by name, but whose thoughts and experiences remain unexplained. In Wiśniewska’s work, photography becomes a motif, a pretext for conversation, a tool for understanding, an attempt to tame the elements and express oneself. ‘About this North, I think it’s all about light,’ she said in an interview with Onet. In summer the sun doesn’t set, in winter the only natural sources of light are the moon and the aurora borealis. Darkness relaxes, gives you security. The white snow doesn’t let you sleep. ‘After months of agonising sunshine’, you’re just waiting for the polar night, during which – as she wrote in White – ‘having lunch by candlelight, photographing the aurora borealis under a full moon in the middle of the day and riding a sparc, that is, a scooter on runners’ is ‘your first contact with a completely new reality’. Photography is light, after all. Literary reportage is reality cropped by the reporter. Wiśniewska does not stop being a photographer when she writes, nor does she lose sight of the potential for narrative when she takes a photograph.

Stories written in light

White is still dominated by a naive, Polish view of the North, a clear division between the known and the unknown, the near and the far, the similar and the different. All you have to do is look at the book’s title (conceived as a counterpart to the name of the Czarne [‘black’ in Polish, trans] publishing house, which put out the book) or at one of the opening chapters (‘Polaryzacja’ [Polarisation], which describes the acquisition of the Norwegian language) to sense this dichotomy. In the reportages that follow, boundaries of various kinds will gradually blur, but they will never completely disappear. They will reappear with a renewed vigour only in Friend of the North, but here the roles are reversed: until now the narrator of a factual story, who is only just learning about Norwegian history and culture, becomes this time a guide through a wintery realm. She becomes the expert on natural phenomena and reveals a few Spitsbergen secrets, while her teenage nephew plays the role of an apprentice, who will put his theoretical knowledge into practice.

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Spitsbergen, photo: Ilona Wiśniewska

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Contrast, but also analogy, is one of the favourite tools of creators of reportage for describing the world. The constant zooming in and out of perspective not only keeps the viewer’s attention but also sharpens the perception of certain phenomena, the experience of other cultures and communities. Wiśniewska makes excellent use of this strategy, making her North both distant – and therefore wildly mysterious and attractive – and close, because it is introduced by someone who has lived there, chosen it as a place to live. The tension of being someone not yet from here but no longer quite from the outside is also emphasised by the opposition between light and darkness, understood both literally and metaphorically, described particularly intensively in White and blurred in the subsequent reportages.

In the Spitsbergen narrative, light and darkness become silent protagonists. However, in contrast to mythical, biblical symbolism, as well as that appearing in philosophical concepts and fairy tales – where light stands for virtue, depth, clarity and beauty, while obscurity is associated with evil, chaos, something indefinable or hostile – in the North this opposition is no longer so clear-cut and, perhaps more importantly, varies according to many factors. Light phenomena affect both the state of mind and the physical condition. The most difficult part seems to be the transition of one state into another, which provokes extreme emotions:

In the second half of October, the sun rises before 11am and sets before 3pm. Longyearbyen is already veiled in obscurity, but on the other side, the last warmly orange rays of the sun are still reflected on the peaks of Operafjellet. Each day they will get shorter and shorter, until one day they will flicker in a dark pink hue at the very tips and then be snuffed out. […] On the one hand there is anxiety and on the other a curiosity about what it will be like, even if one knows exactly that it will just be dark and that around January this darkness will start to become terribly overwhelming.

Anxiety, curiosity… The same feelings appear at the intersection of the self and the stranger, at the moment of contact with an unknown person, culture, incomprehensible language or custom. Wiśniewska’s reports are composed of just such encounters, although sometimes the most difficult conversations are not those you have with others but those you have with yourself.

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Illustration from ‘Przyjaciel Północy’ by Ilona Wisniewska, photo: Agora children’s publishers

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The darker it gets, the more the body starts to become sluggish, slow, unsettled. One doesn’t want to eat, sleep, speak. In a way, everything becomes indifferent. In the dark you have to produce energy for yourself, force yourself for things to be normal. You have to pretend that it makes no difference whether it’s light or dark, even though it does make a difference. But if you’ve decided to spend the winter here, you have to outsmart yourself.

What is crucial is this energy that is born at the intersection of the familiar and the new. In Wiśniewska’s work, this energy accumulates mainly in the language, which draws on poetry and symbolism to express the everyday. It is the fluidity of this malleable storytelling, the rhythm of repetition and the intensity of short sentences like snapshots of impressions. It is worth drawing attention, for example, to the one-word or even monosyllabic titles of the reportages, which connote multiple meanings: ‘white’ evokes both brightness and the inability to sleep, ‘hen’ means near and far [in Polish], the word ‘lud’ can refer to people and ice (lud and lód in Polish, both pronounced ‘lood’, trans), ‘migot’ [in Polish] is an intermittent glimmer of light, a quick movement, a warning of disappearance. In White, the aurora borealis disappears as quickly as it appears:

The mountains glow green. The sky glows green. I am glowing! I lie down on the ground so I can see better. Nobody told me before that the damn aurora moves! The greenness dances its dance right overhead, and it’s like meeting a real deity, even if you don’t have the need to believe in one.

In the North, it is the darkness that organises everyday life and intensifies the feeling of loneliness (‘from which humility is hatched’, as stated in a story from Greenland), while with light ‘the world gets too big’:

[…] snow combined with a white sky blurs all distances, proportions, verticals and horizontals. White can be like black. It removes detail. Too much light hurts, unsettles no less than its absence.

And then there is Beyond:

Since the first night, I have had the irresistible impression that I live in a camera obscura and that any image that will be projected onto the opposite wall will henceforth be inverted and out of focus but the only one possible.

A story in a few frames

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Cover of ‘Lud. Z grenlandzkiej wyspy’ by Ilona Wiśniewska, photo: Czarne Publishers; cover of ‘Migot. Z krańca Grenlandii’ by Ilona Wiśniewska, photo: Czarne Publishers

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Before going to Spitsbergen, Ilona Wiśniewska, a Polish teacher and photo technician by training, worked as a photo editor at a publishing house in Wrocław. In the North, she often takes out her camera to immortalise the characters in her books, the majesty of nature, the landscape of silence and emptiness. Her photos are then a kind of notebook, a record of impressions.

Photography is also the language the reporter uses to communicate with the people of Norway. In White, she meets Eva, the daughter of Herta and Leif A. Grøndal, the famous Spitsbergen photographers who were brought together by a common passion:

One of her mother’s best-known photographs is a view of Longyearbyen from the mountainside on a polar night, with all the lights of the city at the time, of which there are now many more, making it impossible to achieve an effect that is as subtle.

One of the leading characters in Beyond is Ibert Amundsen (privately the author’s father-in-law), whose sons decided to ‘make photography a way of growing up’:

Okładka książki "Hen Na północy Norwegii", autorka: Ilona Wiśniewska, fot. wydawnictwo Czarne — Cover of ‘Hen. Na północy Norwegii’ by Ilona Wiśniewska, photo: Czarne Publishers

The images on the negatives provided the boys not only with pocket money but also with knowledge of the world around them. The first naked girl Bror saw, for example, was while developing photographs in developer solution. She was lying on a sofa, covering her face with a long-playing record, and he overdeveloped the image several times before he could calm down enough to set the darkroom timer correctly.

A Greenland orphanage is home to a teenager named Gert, whose portrait taken in the midst of performing a backflip is featured on the cover of the reportage Folk. The reporter offers him an open-air photographic session:

He’s sixteen years old, with black hair and the ability to see right through his interlocutor. It’s been a month, and he has yet to speak a word to me. […] Instead of words, the boy spits out small beads of saliva. Moving around, he glances under his feet, taking photographs, looking into my eyes through the viewfinder.

The book ends with news of the boy’s suicide. Wiśniewska returns to her protagonist in Glimmer, describes his hometown, visits his mother: ‘I tell her that Gert took interesting pictures and made spectacular flips. And that he taught me a few words, even though we hardly spoke’.

Daniel from Friend of the North receives framed pictures of animals living on Spitsbergen from his aunt for his seventh birthday: ‘to this day they all hang in my room’. This story for younger readers is complemented by Mariusz Andryszczyk’s illustrations in a cool, brownish colour scheme with clearly visible brush or crayon lines. In addition, they are full of expressiveness, nor are they free of schematism and over-scaling, as befits fiction.

In Wiśniewska’s work, photography does not fulfil an artistic or even an aesthetic function but rather is a carrier of memory and emotion (and death, as in the case of Gert), evidence of existence, a kind of bridge between the past and the present. Although it does not contribute to understanding, it helps in establishing communication. It becomes a natural pretext for conversation, a point of connection, something that unites the reporter and many of the characters in her book. Visual language shortens the distance. Perhaps it is this photosensitivity that sensitises the author to the other person – and it is certainly one of the keys to deciphering her reportages.

Translated from Polish by Michał Niedzielski

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