This article is a reflection on my expedition to the Arctic Circle — a journey to the northernmost reaches of inhabited land, where Longyearbyen rests beneath soft skies and the people are as warm as the mulled wine they pour. After four flights, multiple layovers, and hauling what felt like an elephant’s worth of gear — every lens, every backup — I finally arrived. I didn’t want to stand in the Arctic and wish I had brought a different tool. So I brought them all.

Svalbard is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. Perched near the 80th parallel, it is both ancient and raw — its human population small, just over 2,000, yet its scale impossibly vast. Polar bear signs line the edges of town like a whispered promise — or a warning — of what we came to witness. Just eleven of us set sail on a small vessel, off-grid for twelve days. An hour out of port, my phone revealed its irrelevance — no downloaded music, no messages, no feeds — and for the first time in years, I was truly unreachable. In that stillness, something stirred: the realization that I’d been living in constant forward motion. Here, I was invited — forced, even — to be still.

What followed was a dream in slow motion. We slipped into a corridor of mountains where light painted the land in ways I didn’t know were possible. Deep sapphire gave way to electric indigo, which warmed to soft oranges and rose. The hues changed by the second — as if the landscape itself were alive and pulsing with breath. Then, like a shimmer in the distance, we saw a mirage: a veil of ice fragments stretching out like a fallen sky. Last year, the glacier here had been impassable. This year, it was only a wall in memory — a fraction of its former self. The scale jarred me. Towering cerulean and pthalo blues—colours I’ve mixed for years in the studio—were now suspended in front of me in impossible reality.

We kept our distance. Not for fear of falling ice, but for the aftershock — the rolling waves of weight meeting water. Respect for this land is not optional; it’s the first and only rule. From our small zodiac, we sailed into a blanket of millennial ice. Suddenly, we were surrounded by diamonds — the remnants of ancient time, cast adrift. I asked my fellow photographers for a moment of silence. No clicking. No rushing. Just witnessing. Then it began: the sound. A symphony of gentle pops — gases escaping from deep time, releasing into the present. It sounded like popcorn, but felt orchestral. Life, moving on.

I captured a cluster of ice — crystalline facets like a geometry lesson in light. The image I created I later named Puzzle Piece — a shard broken from the greater whole, now dissolving into the sea. A piece of the Arctic’s story lost. The puzzle, forever incomplete.

And still, the wild offered more.

We saw polar bears — many of them. A gift, not a guarantee in Svalbard. Unlike Churchill, where sightings are almost staged, here the experience is unfiltered, intimate. We were alone, drifting through ice and silence, witnessing what felt like the edge of the Earth. The most unforgettable encounter: watching a juvenile bear attempt, again and again, to hunt a group of sixteen walruses. It was a true Attenborough moment. We watched for four hours as he tried — retreating, regrouping, calculating. Eventually, he abandoned the effort, the energy cost too great. All the while, five massive walruses floated beside our zodiac, any one of them capable of capsizing us with a dive. We knew it, and stayed alert. This was no place for error.

Svalbard is a place of contradictions — quiet yet alive, delicate yet fierce. Its glaciers, formed over millennia, now retreat in silence. The ice speaks, if you listen: it pops, it fractures, it melts. We often speak of climate change in numbers and shame. But how many have actually seen the beauty we are losing? How many have stood in silence and watched an ancient world dissolve?

That’s why I make these images — to offer a glimpse of what’s at stake. Not just because it is critical, but because it is breathtaking. We protect what we love. And I hope, in witnessing these moments, you might fall in love with the Arctic too.