Written by: Samuel J. Abrams, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
"The Arctic has long been flattened by two dominant habits of seeing. It appears either as spectacle - an endless white sublime emptied of social life - or as warning sign, reduced to a moral tableau of planetary crisis. In both frames, geography as lived reality disappears. Settlement, interiors, work, infrastructure, and routine are pushed aside in favor of symbolism. What is gained is moral urgency; what is lost is understanding and with it, the ability to judge places as they actually are.
The photography of Inuuteq Storch quietly but decisively resists that tradeoff. His work does not scold or sermonize. It does not demand outrage or awe. Instead, it attends - carefully, concretely, and without ideological theatrics. Across landscapes, interiors, and scenes of labor, Storch insists that Greenland is not an abstraction but a civic and domestic world, shaped by policy decisions, inherited practices, environmental limits, and daily competence.
That sensibility is on full display in Soon Will Summer Be Over, Storch’s first U.S. solo exhibition, now on view at MoMA PS1. The exhibition traces roughly a decade of work across Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but it returns again and again to Storch’s hometown of Sisimiut, a community of about 5,500 people just north of the Arctic Circle. That scale matters. This is not the Arctic as frontier or metaphor, but as town: a place with routines, constraints, institutions, and memory. Seen together, the photographs in the exhibition clarify what this kind of attention accomplishes and why it carries larger civic and cultural implications."
Read the rest of the essay here.
