A Greenlandic Photographer’s Tender Portraits of Daily Life

The stark Greenlandic landscape is a persistent presence in Storch’s photos, and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere. In one of Storch’s pictures, an old man on a wooden porch angles his face up toward the sun. In another, a knockout image featuring two children resting on their backs, sunlight blazes with an almost divisive intent, turning one child’s eyeglasses opaque with its glare while leaving his friend’s face in shadow. Looking at Storch’s work, my mind went to Emily Dickinson’s musings on a “certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons.” But Dickinson was observing her world at a latitude of forty-two degrees. Sunlight means something else entirely in photos made above or near the Arctic Circle, where noon could strike in darkness, depending on the season, and where golden hour might be a nearly constant affair. Storch told me that, at this time of year, sunsets last much longer in Greenland: “Fiery and very slow. Colorful.”

Storch grew up in Sisimiut, a town of some fifty-five hundred people, with no intention of becoming an artist. His father, a professional baker, would sometimes ask him to do menial tasks in the kitchen. Storch would scrub pans to the sound of public radio, its volume turned way up to cut through the sounds of machinery. In his free time, he liked playing music and building things, including paper airplanes augmented with specialized folds. He planned to become an engineer, but discovered an interest in photography through skateboarding, documenting his friends performing tricks. In 2009, he staged a small photo show at a local venue, whose director suggested that he attend Fatamorgana, a photography school in Copenhagen. He enrolled there, then did another year of training at the International Center for Photography, in New York.