Olaf Otto Becker

River 3, 07/2008, position 4

Pigment print with book Sheet size 32,90 x 40,80 cm Image size 31,50 x 39,60 cm Signed and numbered Edition of 25 + 5 AP


After his breathtaking, prize-winning photographs of the coast of Greenland in Broken Line, Olaf Otto Becker turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero. His photographic studies reveal the overwhelming beauty of this ice-covered landscape, while at the same time documenting the existential threat to it; for even here, in this completely uninhabited region, human influences have fatal consequences: dust and soot in the air form black, crusty deposits, which, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets—no doubt with unavoidable catastrophic results.
 
The grand motif for our Collector’s Edition is the fork of a nameless river full of snow melt, somewhere on the island’s ice sheet, 907 meters above sea level. No one knows if the two turquoise-colored strands will reunite somewhere in the distance, or if they will always remain separate and ultimately flow to entirely different parts of the Atlantic, far away from each other.