Ellen Dahl, a Sydney-based artist from Arctic Norway, has won the $30,000 National Photography Prize from the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), for her work exploring climate change in the Arctic.
Dahl’s work was chosen from a field of 12 finalists, including Sammy Hawker, Nathan Beard and Ali Tahayori. It’s a series of four prints, titled Four Days Before Winter, and part of the artist’s larger project Field Notes from the Edge, which explores peripheral spaces including Svalbard in Norway and Tasmania.
The photographs, taken on a trip to Norway in September 2019, depict the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — the fastest-warming place on earth, which is also the site of more than 100 years of coal mining. In late 2023, the Norwegian government mandated the closure of the last coal mine in Svalbard within two years.
Running since 1983, the National Photography Prize is a biennial, acquisitive prize. At the opening event on Saturday, Sydney-based Russian artist Olga Svyatova also won the $5,000 fellowship for an emerging photographer, for their work They/Они, which features family photographs from the 60s paired with photos taken in the present-day.
‘Barren and raw’
Dahl wanted to capture the Norwegian landscape at its most “beautiful and melancholic”, she says.
“I knew that I was pushing my luck going up in mid–late September because it’s right at the cusp of winter.
“I didn’t want Arctic winter. I didn’t want everything to be blanketed in snow. I wanted to look at it when it was at its most barren and raw.”
Nici Cumpston, judge of the National Photography Prize, and curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, says she awarded the prize to Dahl because of the beauty and intimacy of her photographs, and the thoughtfulness and innovation in the way they are displayed.
One large image from Dahl’s series, Collapse, is a close-up of a collapsed terrain caused by melting permafrost. It’s printed on fabric and hangs from the gallery ceiling, moving slightly.
Three photographs in the series were taken in the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden. For Two Sides of the Same Place, a black mountain, once the site of coal mining, is presented on one side of a piece of fabric and a nearby shrinking glacier on the other. The work is mounted at 90 degrees from the wall.
The other photograph taken in Pyramiden is Arctic Coal Diptych, two framed images of a piece of arctic coal — one the original image and the other inverted digitally, turning the coal a shade of glacial blue.
The last photograph, titled Here/Now, depicts a mountain shrouded in fog and is displayed in a light box designed to mimic the soft light of the Arctic.
“It’s such a contradicting concept to have coal mining in the most vulnerable area of the world when it comes to climate change. Climate change is happening incredibly fast up there,” says Dahl.
Not a documentary
Dahl is descended from the Sámi, the Indigenous peoples of the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. She grew up in Hammerfest, in the north of mainland Norway, and studied photography in California before she moved to Australia at the age of 29, where she later received her masters of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney.
Now working across photography, video, sound and installation, Dahl made her start in advertising and editorial photography, and in 2006 her portrait of model Megan Gale was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. She is currently working on her PhD at University of Tasmania.
Dahl doesn’t see herself as a landscape photographer. Instead she’s interested in her photography being a reflection of place, belonging and identity. Her work is not an act of documentary either, but instead is trying to inspire connection between the viewer and Svalbard as a place — at a time when people may feel numb to hearing the facts about climate change.
“I hope people see it maybe from a slightly different perspective and different light and feel something,” she says.
“Being connected to place, wherever that is, is also when you’re going to care about what happens to the world around you.”
Cumpston says it’s important to listen to First Nations artists like Dahl who are highlighting the threat of climate change.
“It’s important for all of us globally to know what’s happening on that international scale, because of course these same effects are happening within our country,” she says.
“But to be able to relate it internationally helps raise a deeper awareness. And it’s really important for the education of the next generation of people coming through, so they actively do something about it.”
The National Photography Prize is at Murray Art Museum Albury until September 1.