Joy and Amelia, age 10, don heart-shaped glasses for a Friday night dance in Arctic Bay. The Inuit place high value on community and cultivate strong social networks—a remnant of an age-old sharing economy that enabled them to survive their harsh environment for thousands of years.
Dreamy Photographs Illuminate Life in Dark Arctic Winters
A photographer’s journey into the Canadian Arctic reveals the vibrancy of life in one of the coldest inhabited regions on the planet.
In early November the sun dips below the horizon in Arctic Bay and the sky bruises violet and blue. The sun won't rise again here for three months, plunging the landscape into infinite twilight.
Amid tundra and sea, Nunavut (“our land” in Inuktitut) is the largest and northernmost territory of Canada, where a majority of the country’s Inuit population cluster in remote coastal communities. Photographer and Fulbright grantee Acacia Johnson embraced one of the coldest and darkest winters on Earth in order to document the Inuit’s evolving relationship with their environment in her dreamlike series, Under the Same Stars.
“The only constant thing about the Arctic landscape is that it’s constantly changing,” Johnson says. “My [original] idea was to do
