• Features

    • Catherine Lemblé Portrays the Fragile Arctic

    October 18th, 2017
    Written by Stanley Bloom
    arctic Belgium landscape nature Norway series snow winter

    Based in Gent, Belgium, Catherine Lemblé is a 27-year-old photographer working part-time to pay her photographic travels & projects. She has a degree in Photography and is currently working on a first book. She likes to evoke the harmony in the mountains and solitary landscapes, as shown in her series Arctic Silence.

    Catherine got interested in the medium following a trip in the mountains in 2005 when she was offered a digital camera. From there, Catherine enrolled photography classes and learned about analog approach. As she regularly came back to the mountain, photography became a way to understand and explore nature, and a way to get grip on things: “I photograph what I want to remember. As Susan Sontag wrote: ‘Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality […] One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images – one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past'”.

    Her ongoing series Arctic Silence takes place in Spitsbergen, Norway, one of the world’s northernmost settlements. Her photographs are a testimony of the sublime spectacle of the North. On the other hand, they convey the fragility of this environment because of global warming effect, since it is specially apparent at this place.

    ”My camera and I have crossed many a mountain and solitary landscape yet this place looked nor felt like anything I had seen before. The great white vastness took me by surprise as I spent my days hiking in the snow. There aren’t any trees standing in Spitsbergen; the cold only permits this eternal naked landscape covered in white pillow-like mountains. I never felt happier hearing nothing but the cracking of snow underneath my feet”.

    Take a tour on her website and flickr.