Part Two: Finding the Mood – How the Storyline has been taking Shape
The deeper I move into this process, the more I understand that making this book is not just about selecting photographs. It’s about listening. Not to trends, or to categories, or even to places—but to the ice itself. What it reveals, what it holds back, and how it transforms everything it touches.
Antarctica, November 2017
This isn’t a book about everything. It’s a book about ice—and how it holds life, reflects light, and eventually lets everything go. It’s a story told through slow looking, through careful presence. The Dream of Ice is slowly becoming not a documentation, but a quiet unfolding.
From Place to Feeling
When I began, it seemed obvious, too obvious, to organise the book by geography. The regions I've returned to over the years—Svalbard, Greenland, Antarctica—each have their own tone, their own light, their own imprint on me.
Greenland, August 2013
But as I moved deeper into the images, something more atmospheric began to speak louder than the map. It wasn’t just where a photo had been taken, but how it felt. I began to see a thread not of movement across space, but a kind of emotional current—flowing from light into shadow, from visibility into trace, from arrival to departure.
The book became less a record of my travels and more a meditation on impermanence and perception—what is clearly seen, what is fleeting, and what quietly disappears.
Listening to the Ice
Ice has always been the true subject. It’s the one constant through all these years and journeys. And yet, it refuses to be pinned down. It changes every day—melting, hardening, fracturing, floating. Sometimes it dominates the frame like sculpture. Other times it’s barely there, a surface holding memory.
I didn’t want to over-define this presence. I wanted to let the ice speak in its own forms. The storyline began to form around qualities instead of locations: the clarity of light on new snow, the tension carved into glacial lines, the soft disappearance of melting forms. The more I trusted that mood, the more the images seemed to group themselves—not by where they came from, but by what they felt like.
Encounters with Quiet Life
One of the turning points came when I looked again at the images of animals and birds. At first I imagined one chapter for wildlife—something simple and elegant, a pause in the landscape to recognise life. But it wasn’t enough. There were two kinds of encounters happening in those images.
Greenland, August 2023
In some, the animal is fully present. A polar bear standing alone, filling the frame. A penguin walking, eye meeting camera. These moments felt solid, grounded, whole. They held stillness and attention.
In others, life felt almost imagined. A bird drifting across the sky, a walrus resting on an iceberg, too far to name. These figures were not just wildlife—they were part of the environment, shaped by it, disappearing into it. More suggestion than statement.
So I let the structure divide them. Not out of taxonomy, but out of respect for the emotional weight each encounter carries. One chapter became a space for full presence; the other, a space for quiet integration.
Toward Dissolution
From there, the storyline started to soften. I realised I didn’t want to end the book with a conclusion. I wanted to end it like a memory—something barely held, almost fading. So the arc moves from clarity and shape, through fragility and transition, toward emptiness and trace.
Svalbard, April 2024
The final chapters are not dramatic. They’re not loud or conclusive. They are almost undone. Minimalist images. Drift. The kind of quiet you hear more than see. The story ends not with closure, but with a kind of release.
That felt honest. That felt right for a book about ice.
Choosing the Right Breath
With the storyline now mostly in place, I’ve begun quietly gathering the photographs that will live within each chapter. Some images announced themselves immediately—anchoring points, emotional centres. Others are more elusive, asking to be felt rather than sorted. It’s a slow and intuitive process, like tuning a sequence of notes until the chord feels right.
I’ve also started exploring early edits. Nothing final yet—just soft treatments to test mood and tone. These early experiments are helping me see how each image speaks within the larger rhythm of the book.
In the next post, I’ll step into the selection and pre-editing phase—the quiet part, where each image begins to take on its own voice. I hope you’ll join me as the story deepens.