Shot in the dark
Camera obscura is a Latin phrase meaning "dark chamber" or "dark room." The phrase is fitting for photography in a place like Svalbard, where the light disappears for over two months every winter.
In the February 2023 installment of The Shot, photographer Daniel Cole talks about covering climate stories on a remote island in northern Norway, in the darkness during the polar night.
The Shot is a monthly series showcasing top photojournalism from photographers at The Associated Press. Each month, AP photographers will share the stories behind some of their iconic imagery.
Produced by AP News staff. The sponsor was not involved in the creation of this content.
Daniel Cole
If we consider photography to be the capturing of light, how is it possible to create photographs in a place where there is no light? This was the challenge I faced as a photographer on assignment for the AP’s climate and religion teams in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard during the polar night, a period from mid-November through the end of January where the sun does not rise, shrouding the arctic landscape in constant darkness.
The harsh conditions and lack of light required inventive solutions that could serve to illuminate the polar night and shed light on the subjects of our stories. I decided to shoot handheld and with wide aperture prime lenses in order to move the way I wanted as I photographed people in their environments.
I found that when there is very little light in a scene, your eye becomes hyper sensitive to the very smallest of light sources which ended up guiding much of the compositional and aesthetic aspects of the pictures. Fittingly enough for a religion story, I had to let myself be guided by the light.
I think that this approach forced me to slow down as a photographer, to anticipate how the scene was going to change as the few light sources available would illuminate people and environments in unpredictable ways. Pictures would appear and disappear in milliseconds depending on the movement of a someone’s headlamp.
The harsh conditions of the arctic circle required a certain level of preparedness and a high tolerance for feeling cold. Taking my gloved hand out of my jacket pocket to brave the cold for each photograph was a humbling experience, one that made you think twice before daring to lift the camera up to your eye. Batteries would deplete much quicker than I was used to in Marseille, where I am usually based in southern France.
Part of our reporting took us deep into Longyearbyen’s last remaining coal mine, Gruve 7. Lit only by coalminers headlamps and shooting through thick atmospheric dust, I was lucky to have dust resistant camera bodies and prime lenses fast enough to capture Norway’s last coal miners at the bottom of the earth in their archipelago at the end of the world.
While I usually photograph people for the stories I work on, Svalbard was an opportunity to turn my lens to the environment and its abstract qualities. The polar night would give way to spectacular light effects in the sky, lighting up the vast landscapes in fascinating ways.
It was a privilege to be in such a beautiful place not as a landscape photographer looking for the technically perfect shot, but instead as a photojournalist searching for images that would tell the story of Svalbard and the changes facing the community that lives there.
Spotlight is the blog of AP Images, the world’s largest collection of historical and contemporary photos.
Produced by AP News staff. The sponsor was not involved in the creation of this content.