Taken in the clear light of the midnight sun, and therefore almost shadowless, these photographs offer breathtaking views of an untouched landscape from a remote part of our planet.

Olaf Otto Becker worked for almost four years and covered thousands of miles by boat creating these photographs of the coastline of Greenland. The resulting images, made in the clear light of the midsummer night over long exposures, are worth the effort. Almost shadowless neo-romantic dreamscapes, they are unrealistically beautiful. Becker sometimes waits days for the right image or condition to appear in order to produce a single image--a process that leaves him with only about 25 photographs per year. Though visually diverse, all of the pictures share the contemplative character of their creator. Becker, who was once a painter, doesn't photograph scenery: He builds compositions, using his eye and his patience to develop a work of melancholic beauty, in the powerful iconography of the nineteenth-century landscape.

His photographs from Iceland possess a certain melancholy and stillness reminiscent of the grandeur of Romantic landscape painting. At the same time, the outlook of an unperturbed explorer and his recording of exact location when photographing turns them into testimonies to a time when an increasingly warm climate is precipitating the disappearance of the glaciers. In this way, the images record the artist’s awe at the beauty of creation—as well as the dangers facing it.