‘There were more dogs than people’

Naoki Ishikawa

I took this one Christmas 15 years ago, in the port town of Ilulissat in Greenland. It was some time between 11am and 2pm, during the few hours they had of daylight. Winter out there is essentially one long night.



There were more dogs than people in Ilulissat. They’re kept outside, even in winter. I saw them everywhere, eating fish or pulling sleds. I met a musher who said I could join him on a hunt. I asked him why he didn’t use a snowmobile. If a snowmobile breaks down, he said, that’s it – whereas dogs just keep on going.



A sled is not comfortable. It’s wooden boards sliding on bumpy snow. I had to hold on tight while trying to take photographs so as not to get blown away. The dogs were so excited, so unpredictable. I liked seeing how they moved, seeing their personalities emerge. I couldn’t make them pose and, to me, that’s what’s so intriguing about photography: capturing the unexpected.



At one point, one of the dogs got its leg tangled in the reins. The musher ran to help and, though they couldn’t communicate with words, I could see their strong bond. I felt that love.



‘Animal heads haunted my childhood’

Clare Benson

A lot of people think the animal I’m carrying here was freshly killed. Actually, it’s a stuffed kudu my father shot on a hunt in Africa. I took the picture on his driveway in north Michigan, where I grew up. My father is a big hunter. In the 1960s, he was a guide in Alaska: there are lots of shots of him carrying the heads of animals on his back. They haunted my sisters and I growing up. I wanted to recreate them, using the biggest animal on his wall.

I tied the kudu head to an old military backpack with bear hide wrapped around it. It was really beautiful and exotic. To see it in that cold landscape was even more absurd than taking any of the other dead animals back into nature. When I put it on my back, I couldn’t see the way the horns come over my head, or how the head curves and aligns with my body, so it was strange and beautiful to see it later. At first, I laughed, but it’s sad too.

Hunting is part of the culture here. Everyone gets the first day of hunting season off school. So I’m interested in the relationship the population has with death. As a child, I helped with prepping and skinning although I never actually killed any animals. I grew up eating a lot of the meat my father would hunt locally: bear, caribou, whatever he brought back. I think there’s something valuable in that.

Hunting as a tradition has been twisted, though. I don’t agree with it when it’s not for survival or sustenance – and I’m not fond of those mounted heads. There’s something absurd in this fascination with representing death and the power of humans to conquer nature.

‘You don’t leave town without a gun’

Julia de Cooker

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago to the north-east of Greenland, the last inhabited place before the North Pole. It has no indigenous population. People from across the world come to visit and live there because you don’t need a visa. If you can find a job, you can stay. There are 45 different nationalities in a population of about 2,300.

Of course, lots of people go there to experience Arctic life but, given the taxes are very low, plenty of them are there for the financial benefits. The towns are only 100 years old. It’s very modern, very new. There are no traditions, things are built from scratch, and this modernity jars with the landscape – it’s uncanny. Being there, you realise the extent to which nature reigns over life. It really is hostile. You become very small and it’s a beautiful feeling.

The limo belonged to a Danish miner, who never really explained why he bought it. In the town there are some roads, but there are too many cars for the number of people living there. At the end of October, there’s a blues festival to mark the beginning of the polar night, and the guy had loaned his limo to a visiting band, which is how I came to see it. Usually it’s hidden under snow.

The people there live in comfort. You’d think you were in a ski resort in the Alps, although some things remind you that you’re not. You never leave town without a gun – because of the bears. And there isn’t a single tree.

‘I became obsessed with skating tights’

Wendy McMurdo

In the mid 2000s, there was a craze for Nintendo sports games, especially skating. I wanted to explore the relationship children had with digital gaming and ended up at Dundee Ice Arena. I wanted to photograph young figure skaters training. Philippa Pickard, in the photograph, was 18 at the time. By some weird coincidence, the skaters who trained there had actually been models for the Nintendo avatars.

I was shooting early in the morning. Although I set up my equipment on the ice, I wasn’t on skates. I had lights and all sorts of electrical cords. The whole thing was slightly scary, but as soon as I looked through the camera, all that melted away. What I saw was incredible, these amazing bodies. I would just watch and occasionally ask them to do a move again. I wanted to produce something like those avatars, like a still from a game.

Skating is all about illusion, much more so than ballet. If you look at female skaters, their tights are stretched down over their boot to extend the line of the leg. I became obsessed with this. I got so close, I could see all the ladders and rips.

Indeterminate Objects by Wendy McMurdo is on at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, until January 2018.



‘I wandered through an empty New York’

Michele Palazzo

When Storm Jonas hit New York in early 2016, the city shut down. Roads, subways and shops all closed. Everyone stayed indoors but I couldn’t wait to get out. It was a Saturday and I was so excited I woke up at 6am and grabbed my camera.

I’m a street photographer. But that morning, nobody was around. Walking through the heart of the city with no cars, no subway and no pedestrians was weird – New York is never empty. I wandered down to the Flatiron Building. I pass it every day and have seen it in every kind of weather. I’m friends with the doorman, who has shown me around and let me in on its secrets.

Normally photographers attempt to capture the whole building. But because it’s about 20 storeys tall, you either have to stand really far away or tilt your lens upwards, which distorts the image. Instead, I focused on the lower level. The wind was unbelievable.

I posted it on social media and it went viral. It completely changed my career. There are so many photos of the Flatiron, it’s hard to be original. What’s special about this shot is that it looks like it’s suspended in time. It’s not clear if it was taken today, or in the past, or even if it’s a photo at all.

‘The ice buildings can be 40 metres tall’

Massimo Vitali

Photograph: -

This snow and ice festival takes place in Harbin, a Chinese city that looks as if nobody lives there, even though it actually has a population of around 6 million. I didn’t see many cars, but the air pollution was unbelievable. The sky was a dark yellow and it was really cold, with temperature going as low as -46C. Sunny days were -29C.

Every year when the river starts to freeze, they cut up big chunks of ice and use them to make buildings. The tallest rise to 40 metres. I don’t fully understand how they are built and when I saw neon signs being wired into the ice, I didn’t think they looked safe. But nothing happens.

Visitors come mostly for the light displays at night, which are super-theatrical and kitsch. I preferred the subtlety of the daytime: no one around, just endless shades of white. Here, you can see the contrast in colour and texture between the ice and snow sculptures. The ice stays blue-grey, the snow is more yellowish.

The people come well-equipped in furs, mittens and hats. They seem to enjoy themselves. You see couples taking pictures, laughing, with kids on sleds. It felt normal. What didn’t feel normal was the money being spent. I don’t remember the exact entry fee, but it was substantial. And once you’re inside, there are tea houses, restaurants and horse-drawn rides, all extra. I was quite shocked.

‘People start preparing displays in July’

Jesse Rieser

I took this in Arizona where the climate is warmer and drier at Christmas. That means people can go next-level with their outdoor decorations. This woman was setting up displays and vignettes. As well as these reindeer, she had a Santa kneeling and praying over baby Jesus in a manger. I thought it was ironic, funny and very Christmassy – tying these two elements together.

Many people start planning their decorations in July and August. They take great pride in what they create. It is celebratory, almost childlike, often rooted in nostalgia and escapism. It is also a way of bringing people together. In suburban America, homes often have garages attached – you park and you’re already inside – so there isn’t much interaction with neighbours. But at Christmas, these extravagantly decorated homes are like community centres. The kids want to go and hang out at them, so the parents follow.

My little brother was assisting me and the woman invited us in for dinner after, despite having never met us before. The Christmas spirit isn’t just in the displays.

‘He drilled through and lowered the light’

Hiraki Sawa

This isn’t technically a photograph. It is taken from a video I filmed at Lake Shuparo on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. I was filming a friend, an artist called Tetsuya Umeda, while he performed for 10 hours straight in sub-zero temperatures.

The idea was to light the lake from the inside, below the ice. So Tetsuya made his way across the surface with a drill and a large light bulb. I filmed from a distance as he bored through the ice – which, thankfully, was thick enough to stand on.

He lowered the bulb through the hole, then pulled it from the water, swung it through the darkness and submerged it again. The way the light refracted through the water was incredible.

‘The elder is Sitting Bull’s descendant’

Matt Hamon

Photograph: Matt Hamon

I live in Missoula in Montana, which is about a 14-hour drive from the Standing Rock reservation. When I saw the story of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest unfolding, I went there to document what was happening.

This was taken on my first visit, in mid-November. It was starting to get cold. The tribal people are so resilient, so connected to their history there, living all seasons in their teepees. I think it was empowering for them to stick it out in the howling wind, at below freezing. They planned to stay for as long as it took to stop the pipeline.

The man to the left, wearing the white jacket and red headband, is a tribal elder, a direct descendent of Sitting Bull, the historic chief of the Lakota tribe. Thirty minutes later, the young man in the middle – pictured here with the bicycle – was being restrained by other protestors. He was very angry with the police.

There was a lot of tension, which ultimately the elder defused, telling everybody: “Hey, we understand you’re angry and frustrated and you have a right to be, but we need to respond with our voices.” The elders were committed to peaceful resistance.

The shift in our administration – from Obama to Trump – meant that the police were allowed to crack down, and the protest was eventually dispersed. From what I hear, the area is still policed pretty heavily. It’s unlikely that they would allow that kind of gathering again.

‘It’s nicknamed the Siberia of Switzerland’

Thomas Flechtner

La Chaux-de-Fonds is the coldest place in Switzerland. The unforgiving winters endured by this small town, nestling high in the Jura mountains, have earned it a nickname: the Siberia of Switzerland.

I lived there at the end of the 1990s. I wanted to be somewhere remote and inaccessible. When night fell, I would walk for hours, completely alone in the dark. I worked with a tripod using long exposures, up to 20 minutes. One night, temperatures plummeted to -42C. When you’re exposed to such extremes, you only go out when you have to and you don’t stop to contemplate a scene without a reason. My camera gave me that reason.

I came upon this building by chance. The neon cross in the window scattered light across the snow. I would never have noticed it in daytime. It had the air of a sect about it. I never found out what the building was, nor who lived there. People have compared the shot to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, but I like leaving it open, letting the viewer imagine the story inside.

The shot captures that profound silence snow brings, the kind you would normally only find in a desert, far away from the city. In the winter, places full of human activity become voids in the landscape.

‘I liked the blue of his bobble hat’

Camille Mack

Photograph: Camille Mack

I walked past this chicken shop in London one night last January. I had probably walked past it in the summer but now, in the dark and cold, it really jumped out at me. The windows were steamed up. Inside it was super-kitsch and brightly lit with neon signs. I went back to photograph there one lunchtime.



I didn’t have long to get the shot. As soon as someone’s aware you’re taking their picture, they change the way they’re acting. And the last thing anyone wants when having a quick bite and licking their lips is to be interrupted by a photographer.

I liked the softness of the winter light hitting this guy’s face, the way he’s framed all in red by the walls and imitation leather seats. The blue of his bobble hat and Pepsi can caught my eye, too. It was a perfect moment of winter stillness in a typical London setting.

A lot of people don’t understand why I photograph chicken shops. But I think they’ve become a huge part of London culture. In a city that’s changing rapidly, becoming increasingly unaffordable, they are comforting, familiar places.

‘Their parents were down the mines’

Lucas Foglia

It was soccer practice at Star Valley High School and the boys were doing headers. The coach had just tossed the ball in and all the players went for it, clustering and tussling. One of them is taller and seems quite unconcerned, like he just knows he’s going to get it.

I’ve photographed everyday life in rural America for 10 years. I took this in Wyoming, where I found cowboys and cattle side by side with the mining industry – coal, gold and oil. While these boys were playing football, a lot of their parents were feeding livestock or working the mines.

Star Valley is one of the most rural communities in the US. I’d heard about this isolated valley, with its ranches, farms and mines surrounded by endless acres of land. The mountains in the background mark the beginning of a three million acre expanse.

I stayed with the Mortensen family on the edge of town. Nothing was happening because the snow was everywhere. I was starting to think I might need to find somewhere else to photograph. Then Christopher, one of the sons, mentioned football practice. I’d no idea how they would play with all the snow, but a local mining company had paid to give the pitch underground heating.

I stayed until sunset. Some kids were picked up by their parents. I walked home with Christopher, to have dinner with his family. Some of those kids had travelled far to get there. Some of them went back to houses where you can’t see another soul on the horizon.

Human Nature by Lucas Foglia is published by Nazraeli Press. The solo exhibition is at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York, until 13 January.



‘His brother fell through ice and drowned’

James Casebere

This is a photograph of a model built in my studio, which is how I do all my work. It involved an unusually complicated set, based on Caspar David Friedrich’s 1824 painting, The Sea of Ice. Friedrich had never been to the North Pole, yet his work documented a ship that ran aground on ice there. On a personal level, it may also have been a re-enactment of the trauma Friedrich experienced as a child, when his brother fell through ice on a lake and drowned.

I left the ship out. I didn’t want to replace it with something more contemporary and, besides, the subject was the ice. I used washes of paint to get the right depth of colour, and tried to emulate the complicated – and entirely unnaturalistic – lighting Friedrich gave it.

Environmental concerns are often in the background of my work. I thought about how this same image would evoke a completely different response today, in the era of melting ice caps and global warming.

I did once go to the Arctic circle. It was the summer in Sweden. I took the train north, as far as you can go, and got caught in a snowstorm. I had to turn back. There was zero visibility and I didn’t have warm enough clothes.

‘The lights were going out on Bush’s era’

Alec Soth

I was driving through South Dakota in 2008, on my way home to Minnesota. I saw this tiny church, some farm equipment and a van with a For Sale sign. The light in the church matched the moon. It was a fleeting, magical moment: this vast, windswept open prairie has a sombre beauty. Like much of middle America where I live, there’s a toughness to it.

I can’t imagine it’s a functioning church. There were no sounds coming from within. I think it’s a roadside art statement. I have crisscrossed America and you see religion everywhere. People make these enormous crosses, or homemade billboards with biblical passages. They may not be art, but these are humble, creative gestures.

I included this in a self-published newspaper I made, called the Last Days of W, to mark the end of the George W Bush era – back when we thought that those were difficult times. All the works were taken during the eight years of Bush’s presidency. I published it after the election, so it was not a protest. The lights were just going out on that era and I was celebrating, anticipating Obama. It’s heartbreaking to talk about now.

‘People boil eggs in the street’s hot spring’

Grant Gunderson

When ski season starts, I’m on the road nonstop for six months, chasing the snow around the globe. This was taken on my first trip to Japan in 2011. Japan actually gets more snow than anywhere in the world so the quality of deep-powder skiing there is fantastic.

Everything is laid-back and easygoing in the mountains. There’s no mad rush to beat the crowds because there’s never really that many people on the slopes. Japan had a ski boom back in the 1980s but that’s died off. So, what with the food being amazing and the people super-friendly, it’s very different to going to a mega-resort in the Alps.

This is Myoko Kogen, on the main island of Honshu, about a three-hour bullet train from Tokyo. It’s more of a “mom and pop” resort. The snow was so good, we stayed out until they basically kicked us off the mountain. It was snowing hard and we were walking through a town lit up with all these kanji signs.

Myoko is still a traditional Japanese mountain town. It has never tried to cater to foreigners. There’s a hot spring in front of one of the shops. People boil their eggs in it.

‘The skier’s eyes look right at you’

Tina Barney

This was a very candid moment at my friend Susan’s house in Connecticut. It was 1987 and I was staying with her. I don’t usually get sappy about my work, but Susan – on the left – looks kind of angelic. She has that Renaissance-style haircut and she’s looking up in a kind of spiritual way. And then there’s that wonderful gesture her daughter is making, so affectionate, touching her mother’s hair in the light.

Susan’s husband’s had a relative who was a painter and his works were all over the house. This fabulous skier was right there in the middle. I use art in a lot of my work. I’m always interested in how people collect it, what they hang on their walls. I also liked the style. It’s figurative, kind of realism with a looseness to it. The boy’s eyes seem to look into the camera.

I remember being struck by the light. When the New York Museum of Modern Art bought this shot, the curator John Szarkowski said it had a Georges de la Tour quality. People always think that’s a candle on the table but it’s actually a bottle of glue.

Tina Barney, a monograph of the artist’s work, is out now on Rizzoli



Interviews by Tom Graham, Edward Siddons, Eiko Soga, Dale Berning Sawa, Mischa Frankl-Duval, Amy Fleming and Sam Richards.

