The Hunt
Photography by Andrea Gjestvang, essay by Sabine Barth. Edited by Ben Shattuck for the Pilot Issue, Sepember 2011.
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In Brief:
Where the land ends and the ice continues, the seal hunters of Greenland battle hunger, fatigue, and biting cold to put food on their families’ tables. Due to shrinking hunting grounds and stringent EU catch quotas, this already difficult way of life is becoming ever more challenging to sustain.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two hundred small hunting-and-fishing-based settlements throughout Greenland. Today only eighty remain.
I’ve always been fascinated with life in the frozen North. When we green-lighted Andrea’s images earlier this spring, I was the first to raise my hand when then-Managing Editor John Knight asked for a story editor. The incongruous mix of romance and strain for those who live just below the Arctic Circle transports the viewer, pushes the viewer out of her everyday life to a world most of us could only dream of visiting, a world that seems like a dream in and of itself. That said, life for those in the North is an inextricable part of the story—under the awe-inspiring Northern Lights and scattered across the clean snowscapes are people trying to make it through the winter. We have to remember this.
Sabine’s first person account of the hunt is reportage at its most visceral form. Her words paired with these images portray the majesty of Greenland and the delicate, perhaps even finite, means of its people.
—Ben
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