Spitsbergen – Cold Beauty – Photo Book

This photo book features the images prominently, as they speak for themselves. Each one is accompanied by a little map that shows where the photo has been taken. A short introductory text in 4 languages (German, English, Dutch, Norwegian) soon gives way to the photos, that dominate 152 out of 160 pages. Comprehensive explanatory text including a lot of general information about Spitsbergen with its landscape, wildlife etc. can be found elsewhere (see the guidebook Spitsbergen-Svalbard).

The photos show impressions of the beauty and diversity of arctic nature with its landscapes and scenery, the wildlife, flowers, and light. By showing and documenting this, at the same time they inform about many of Spitsbergen’s different faces, from the sea to mountain peaks and through different seasons from the (near) dark period to the midnight sun.

The photos invite to enjoy and to dream. They may inspire new plans or wake up pleasant memories. They were taken during ship-based journeys as well as skiing and hiking adventures.

152 out of a total of 160 pages are dedicated to the colour photos. The choice of the landscape format for the A5-size pages follows the proportions so often displayed by arctic scenery with its endless horizons.

Opposed to other photo books which are often produced as cheap souvenirs, „Spitsbergen – Cold beauty“ has been produced at a print shop in bicycle-distance from the author, to enable close cooperation during the time-consuming process of careful digital image development. Author/photographer and printer have spent a lot of time together to reproduce the original colours of nature in print as much as possible.

A short word about image processing: similarly to good old slide film that needed to be developed if you want to see more than a piece of plastic, digital imaces have to be processed to reproduce the original colour and atmosphere of the natural reality at the time the camera clicked. The author guarantees that photos have been carefully developed, but in no way manipulated: they do not show anything that has not been there. But everything they do show has been there at the time. They show the arctic reality as seen by the photographer through the lense.