The Quiet Sea

Water at rest in the long blue half-light of a northern winter.

A close view of a shoreline where a thin white line of frost follows the edge of the receded tide across smooth grey stones and dark wet sand. — Frost LineUttakleivCover

Place: Lofoten, Norway
Season: Winter
Theme: Water
Photographs: 8 · Colour

In the weeks either side of the solstice the sun never fully rises over Lofoten. What it leaves instead is a long, blue-grey half-light that rests on the water for hours, and a sea that seems to have forgotten how to move. I went out each morning before the fishing boats, to the beaches at Skagsanden, Uttakleiv and Haukland, and waited for nothing in particular to happen. These photographs are what the waiting looked like: tide lines drawn in frost, a single cabin lamp across the fjord, mountains standing in their own reflection. It is a series about water at rest, and about how much there is to see once you stop asking it to perform.