VICTORIA HARBOUR – The vast, stark beauty of the Arctic struck Mark Aspland with the force of a polar vortex when he arrived in Nunavut late last summer.

So, when the 29-year-old Victoria Harbour native and photographer saw a need to help the people of Iqaluit, it was only natural for him to do so by sharing images of the region.

“In addition to it being a unique and beautiful environment, there are also some frightening statistics about mental health and suicide,” he said. “I hate to see people suffering.”

Nunavut has one of the highest suicide rates in the world – for the Inuit, it’s an estimated 13 times higher than the rate for the rest of Canada, according to a 2013 study. The rate among young Inuit men in Nunavut is 40 times the rate of their peers in the rest of Canada.

Faced with such bleak figures, Aspland grabbed his camera and began snapping pictures of the landscape around Iqaluit to create a stockpile of striking photographs. Next he created a website called Nunavut Images and offered his photos for sale, with all proceeds going to the Nunavut Kamatsiaqtut Help Line, a phone-in distress service.

The site went live Feb. 24. Visitors who purchase images for $10 receive an email with a link to download the high-resolution image, which they can then print and share as they like.

Aspland, who attended Victoria Harbour Elementary School and Midland Secondary School, has been in Nunavut for less than two years. A graduate of the television/new media production program at Loyalist College in Belleville, he was freelancing as a videographer in 2013 when he came across a job posting.

He was offered a job in July of that year as a videographer at Atiigo Media in Iqaluit, and moved to the territory’s capital two months later.

While his photo venture is not a registered charity, Aspland said he plans to donate the sale proceeds on a quarterly basis and then upload receipts to the site to show how much money has made its way to Kamatsiaqtut.