Olaf Otto Becker-Set

For over ten years now, Olaf Otto Becker (*1959 in Travemünde, Germany) has traveled the Far North on a search for the first ever image of the primeval landscape, where the eye reaches the limits of familiar vision and nature becomes a mirror of the soul. He observes distinctive geographic features and waits for the ideal light conditions for taking photographs that testify to great clarity, breadth, and concentration. Whether along the coastline or on the Greenland ice sheet, or into Iceland’s most remote regions ( Broken Line and Above Zero ), his photographic studies always reveal the overwhelming beauty of these icescapes as well as their existential endangerment. Even here, in these completely uninhabited regions, human influences have fatal consequences: dust and soot in the air form black, crusty deposits that, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets—with no doubt unavoidable catastrophic consequences.