Polar Night | by Mark Mahaney – burn magazine

Polar Night | by Mark Mahaney

Polar Night | by Mark Mahaney  71.2906° N, 156.7886° W Utqiaġvik, Alaska Top of the world they call it. Don’t feel that way. Feels like the bottom. So dark there’s no end. So cold there’s no feel. …

via burn magazine: https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2022/05/polar-night-by-mark-mahaney/

Mark Mahaney’s Polar Night is a passage through a rapidly changing landscape in Alaska’s northernmost town of Utqiagvik. It’s an exploration of prolonged darkness, told through the strange beauty of a snowscape cast in a two month shadow. The unnatural lights that flare in the sun’s absence and the shapes that emerge from the landscape are unexpectedly beautiful in their softness and harshness. It’s hard to see past the heavy gaze of climate change in an arctic town, though Polar Night is a visual poem about endurance, isolation and survival.