For New Years 2020, I traveled from my home in Los Angeles to Northern Norway, to photograph architecture and designed spaces in the polar twilight. I flew to Alta and then drove for 2 days to the eastern most point of Norway, Vardø, to see both the architecture of this area and to experience the polar night at the top of the world. At this time of the year, the sun never rises above the horizon and the entire region is bathed in about 5 hours of twilight each day. Perfect for photography.
I arrived in Vardø on New Years Eve and spent the last few hours of light wandering the city, looking around. Vardø is a small, out of the way, town that was an important fishing port and is now an important watch station for the US military to monitor the Russian Navy’s activities out of the port of Murmansk. There is a large radar Dome on the top of the largest hill on the eastern side of town, with a rumored 14 level basement below ground used to spy on Russia.
I had come there to escape LA and to explore the work of Biotope, a small architectural firm in town that specializes in wildly Modern birding shelters both in the area and across Europe. Secondarily, I also came to see Peter Zumthor’s Memorial to 91 “witches” that were burned in the 1600’s, Steilneset, which is the subject of these images.
I awoke New Years Day to the first clear morning of the trip. After a warm breakfast I suited up for the -3 C weather, packed my camera and tripod, and headed out to see the Zumthor building. Based on the photos of the project I was not expecting to be that impressed, but I should have known better. As I approached I quickly realized that this was a very special building. The overall design references the wooden fish drying racks found all over Norway’s coastal cities, but extends into the biological with the suspended fabric enclosure that seems to suggest digestion or the stretching of bladders from deep sea creatures. And inside is the clinical horror and brutality of the witch burnings that happened here over 350 years ago.
The second Zumthor building, of tinted glass panels on a steel frame, encloses a sculpture by American Artist Louise Bourgeois entitled 'The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved'. It is a burning bronze chair with suspended mirrors above that look down and distort their reflections. The only sound inside is the wind and the clicking of the self-starting ignitor which keeps the flame burning continuously, 24 hours a day.
I spent about 3 hours photographing and exploring the 2 buildings both inside and out. The light was exactly what I came here to find, and I continued to shoot until the darkness arrived. Then, after dinner, with more energy than I knew what to do with, I went back to see the Memorial under the light of a waxing moon, and to feel the presence of the history of this place situated between the town cemetery and the sea, between the radar dome and the moon, and between our terrible present and our horrific past.
