Witness to climate change in progress

Ever since his first visit to the Arctic in 2003, the photographer Olaf Otto Becker (*1959 in Travemünde, Germany) has returned there again and again. Starting in Ilulissat, one of the oldest settlements in western Greenland, Becker and his camera have traveled by boat on the polar sea, looking for icebergs. Like floating giants, the white mountains jut out of the water, their many majestic shapes reflected in it below. In their peaceful sublimity there is always also a sense of fragility, as he himself says: “For me, icebergs are wonderful temporal sculptures created of their own accord, yet at the same time they are also natural monuments, reminders of the continuing process of climate change, which we humans are now influencing to a great extent for the first time in the history of our planet.”