Broken Line

Olaf Otto Becker, born in 1959, worked for almost four years and covered thousands of miles by boat creating these photographs of the coastline of Greenland. The resulting images, made in the clear light of the midsummer night over long exposures, are worth the effort. Almost shadowless neo-romantic dreamscapes, they are unrealistically beautiful. Becker sometimes waits days for the right image or condition to appear in order to produce a single image—a process that leaves him with only about 25 photographs per year. Though visually diverse, all of the pictures share the contemplative character of their creator. Becker, who was once a painter, doesn’t photograph scenery: He builds compositions, using his eye and his patience to develop a work of melancholic beauty, in the powerful iconography of the nineteenth-century landscape. He has exhibited widely in Europe, and his previous monograph was short-listed for the Rencontres D’Arles Book Award.