“In 1984, while working as a Production Manager on the SANTA CLAUS film starring Dudley Moore and John Lithgow, I lived in Greenland for about 5 months.
Mainly based on the northwest coast in and around Illulisat but also in Nuuk, the Capitol. It was a unique and wonderful experience to get to know this unusual and special place as well as get to know many Greenlanders whose ancestors have successfully lived and survived in Greenland’s harsh arctic conditions for thousands of years.
When I was first there, I had the good fortune to spend several weeks doing a location scout of almost the entire west coast of Greenland in a chartered Greenland Air helicopter, taking thousands of “visual information photos” of Greenland’s rugged spectacular beauty. Up on the ice cap, along the coast and out over the sea ice. The 500 or so photos in this book were never meant to be perfectly framed, taken in perfect weather or to be “pretty”. The purpose of film location scout photos is to provide visual information. The photos were taken in a hovering, vibrating helicopter, in all the many types of weather present up and down the west coast of Greenland in early Spring. Sometimes the weather would totally change in the space of a few minutes. Sometimes we were suddenly in “White Out” conditions. Sometimes, the photos were taken in dim twilight at the end of a long day. When the weather along the coast of Greenland gets misty, which it often does, the whitish air blends with Greenland’s all-white surfaces to create a sort of monochrome dreamlike feeling. But, in a way, the constantly changing weather and lighting conditions are an integral part of the actual Greenland ambiance, and capturing that in the photos lends authenticiy.
Unlike photography via dogsled, boat or trekking on the ground, helicopter photography has an extreme flexibility. One moment, you’re up on the ice cap, the next moment hovering over an impassable mass of crushed ice, and a few minutes later, out over the sea ice amongst huge icebergs.
Greenland’s scale is immense. The ice cap is about 1500 miles north to south, 500 to 600 miles wide and at it’s center, 2 miles thick. If the Greenland ice cap were ever to completely melt, the entire world’s oceans would rise 23 or so feet. Huge mountains, often carved by the slowly moving flow of ice, are ubiquitous, making it impossible for Greenlanders to build roads between their various cities and towns. Some of the icebergs can be gigantic.”