The end of winter

Beskrivning

Living in Sweden the change of seasons is in my DNA. Nature has been my entry to natural sciences, a safe home, and an endless source of inspiration. I love winter with its ice and snow, to an extent where it is part of my Nordic identity.

This is all now at risk. Our winters will cease to be in just a few decades, and the sea is turning to a threat. A threat that our way of living has created and that not only my children, but hundreds of generations need to take the consequences of.
We are all familiar with the iconography and generic images used to visually communicate the climate crisis – smokestacks, polar bears in distress and solar cells. In this project I explore if a more personal photographic expression of imagery could help us understand our own role in the crisis.

For the subject matter I have photographed three different themes landscapes in black and white symbolizing the dying winter intertwined with street scenes from our daily carefree life as well as original dia-positives from my own childhood more than 50 years ago. By doing so I reflect over the fact that the climate crisis is caused by my generation in the industrialized world. At the start of a decade that will be crucial for alleviating our mistakes, my first grandchild was born. Will he be able to grow up as carefree as I did, or will my life in abundance hamper his?

All images have been printed and left to freeze in the Baltic Sea overnight. There they have been rephotographed under a thin sheet of fresh ice. The sea and the ice serve as metaphors for the climate crisis. The resulting distortion gives an indication of how dramatic a few degrees temperature change can affect our lives.

Our way of living must change, and the focus of my project is to visualize the effect of climate change in my nearby surroundings, emphasizing my worries of the effects should we fail to limit global warming. My hope is that by exhibiting the project its personal and aesthetic qualities will spark an interest and engage the viewer to make behavioral change with a pro environmental outcome.

https://www.contextphoto.com/theendofwinter