Paul Hoi is a photographer based in Oakland, California. His fascination with desolate landscapes led to an ambitious trip amidst the Arctic tundra; exploring the Norwegian region of Svalbard with his Polaroid Spectra camera. The temperatures there are utterly hostile to camera equipment — and shooting was challenging — but he braved the cold to capture a few fleeting frames of this mystical landscape.
I first heard about Svalbard through an article on the Global Seed Vault. The ‘Doomsday Seed Vault’ is built into the Arctic permafrost to preserve the seeds of plants around the world against war and natural catastrophe. It was photos of the futuristic entrance to the vault that would become an anchoring point for the many things I’d learn about the archipelago. That burials are criminalized in Svalbard because bodies don’t decompose properly. That a lonely grand piano known as ‘Red Oktober’ sits in the middle of Pyramided, a Soviet-era ghost town overlooked by the world’s northernmost statue of Vladimir Lenin. Every little detail increased the romance and mystifying glow in the lead up to my trip. I’d often spend entire nights scrolling through images of the Arctic desert in different times of the year.
Several months later, in February, I was arriving at a guesthouse on the outskirts of Longyearbyen, the largest settlement on the archipelago of Svalbard. I planned to explore the black Stave Church of Hopperstad and the famous Nærøyfjord, a narrow fjord in Sogn og Fjordane. It was a little below -20°C before windchill. It wasn’t particularly cold, but very windy – the powdered snow whipped around my feet in the pale light of the street lamps. The snowplough hummed through the streets every hour. The receptionist warned me that frostbite was common, and that the water-based lotion I’d brought would literally freeze on my face if I were to step outside with it on. When leaving the immediate territory of Longyearbyen, it was necessary to carry a rifle, as safeguard against the prevalence of polar bears.
“The blue ice melts much slower than regular ice,” my guide says, a rifle slung around her shoulders, “I like to go up there and take some home – it goes great with my whisky…”
On the night of my arrival I got a call from my guide about the following day’s snowmobile trip; everyone else in my group had cancelled, probably due to the bad weather. We decided on an excursion toward the Von Post Glacier and the frozen fjord of Tempelfjorden, a trek of about 85 miles eastward. After a safety rundown and packing on pounds of snowmobile gear, we left around 9:30am the next morning. I was in awe of the powerful snowmobile engines, but it was surprisingly easy to learn on a flat enough surface. Leaving the edge of town, we stopped by abandoned mining shafts and some frozen waterfalls. Here, my Minolta Instant Pro –hastily wrapped in cut-up wool socks – failed for the first time. I resorted to using my RZ67 for the remainder of the tour that day.
A little past noon we neared Glacier Von Post. At first, it appeared as a jagged, rough blue slit across the white backdrop of Tempelfjorden. Its color is due to the nonstop pressure from the rear of the glacier terminus; as the air is squeezed out of the densifying ice, the glacier takes on a blue tinge. Riding about a hundred feet behind my guide across the frozen fjord, I was taken aback by its sheer size.
After about half an hour of fumbling with my frozen RZ67, we looped back to take shelter in the Noorderlicht, a schooner intentionally left frozen in the fjord. Known as ‘The Ship in the Ice’ it was built by the German Navy in the early 20th century. It’s been renovated many times since the war, operating as a worker’s hostel as well as a clubhouse for the German elite before being sold to the Netherlands. It now serves as an expedition basecamp, and operates as a tourist sailing vessel in the Arctic Circle during the warmer seasons. Inside its cozy interiors, we ate a hearty meal as the sky got dark.
All of the stops on the tour were fascinating in their own unique ways, but what particularly struck me were the many hours spent on the snowmobile between destinations. Whenever I travel to barren landscapes, I always forget how much our sense of direction and scale is anchored to the things built around us — roads, lights, buildings, and so on. These everyday signposts disappear; the sheer expanse and desolation of the Arctic desert utterly imposing. It was disorienting. The powdery winds often obscured the horizon, which, from the perspective of an accelerating snowmobile, made it looked as though the sky and ground had merged, and you’re entering a suspended mass with no focal point but other riders and the obscured mountains ahead.
Before our long trek back into Longyearbyen I took out my iPhone to snap a distant mining shaft – it flickered, delayed in its reaction, and occasionally shut down. This was about 15 minutes after we started riding, just a few miles outside of town. All of my instant cameras unequivocally failed during the tour, and my medium format struggled with a frozen lever. I did take a few instant photos before and after the snowmobile tour – including the ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault – mostly by keeping the cameras close to my body while shooting very quickly. The Impossible Spectra film I used developed into an otherworldly cyan-blue, which I love, and captures the temperament of the region pretty well. Whenever time and money allows, I’d love to return for a much longer stay.
TOOLS
Shop Camera
Polaroid® Image/Spectra
Shop Film
Color Film for Spectra Cameras
ARTIST BIO
Explore more of Paul’s work with Impossible film on
his Website, Flickr, or connect with him on Instagram
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