Svalbard

Svalbard sits at roughly 78° north, which means that for part of the year there is no night, and for another part there is no day, and the light in between does things that are genuinely difficult to plan for. What drew me there was the polar bears and the sea ice; what I found was a landscape of such sustained, flat vastness that the scale becomes its own subject.

This is not Antarctica. The terrain is lower and more open, the ice is salt water (broken and drifting as you move north toward the pole), and the silence is a different quality of silence — less absolute, more exposed. The bears move across it like they own it, which they do. I was there with a camera and a reasonable amount of respect for that fact.