White Box

The Polarex expedition

A few years ago, while visiting an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, I was drawn to a small photo in black and white. A remarkable narrative energy emanated from this image; I would only be able to explain it later, when I learned the story behind it.

Nils Strindberg, the young Swedish photographer who took these photos, participated in the ‘Polarex’ expedition led by the engineer Salomon Auguste Andrée in 1897. Departing from Spitzbergen, Norway, Andrée planned to fly over the North Pole in gas balloon to either Russia or Canada, depending on the direction of the wind. Andrée, Strindberg, and a third man, Knut Fraenkel – aged 43, 25, and 27, respectively – departed on July 11, 1897 with great fanfare, observed by politicians and the national and international press. They never came back…

Wild theories about the explorers’ fate emerged in the sensationalist press. But as time passed, hopes of ever finding the missing members of the expedition dwindled; even Anna, Nils Strindberg’s fiancée, ended up marrying another man.

But 33 years later, in 1930, an icebreaker landed on Kvitøya, or White Island. Usually inaccessible, constantly surrounded by thick ice and hidden by freezing mist, the island of Kvitøya is legendary among whalers and walrus hunters. On that day, in a stroke of fortune, neither ice nor fog kept Captain Eliasson and his team, including the scientist Gunnar Horn, from landing on the island.

As luck would have it, two crewmen stumbled upon the buried remains of the Polarex expedition. While looking for potable water, a metal hook sticking out of the ice caught their eye. As they dug it out, they uncovered parts of a boat, tools, utensils, a logbook, human remains, and, finally, a camera and rolls of film still encased in a light-proof box. The negatives of 240 photos taken by Nils Strindberg could at last be developed after 33 years of frozen slumber. 93 images were salvaged.

A survival story in pictures

Through the photos, the story begins to take shape. A sensitive, perceptive man, Nils Strindberg preserves his modesty and dignity as he carefully chooses his compositions even in their growing distress. Andrée probably wanted to document their trek for glory and fame, but looking at the photos, we feel that Strindberg, who must have been conscious of the ineluctable failure of the expedition, exceeds his commission. In a simple, humble, even detached fashion, he deliberately conjures through his images their survival story.

From the diaries we know the balloon failed three days after its departure, on July 14. The three men drifted on the ice floe until September 12, then wandered on Kvitøya (the White Island) until October 6. They passed three summer months in the North Pole, where night resembles day, where it is always light out, where the sensation of time passing is supplied only by a watch’s motion. Constantly wet and poorly equipped, they walk and camp for three months in the bright cold.

“Without a horizon, the notion of space only exists
on the face of a compass or in the count of steps taken.”

The field is made of ice, covered by snow; the misty sky is perpetually white and impossible to distinguish from the ground; everything is the same, endless and blinding. Without a horizon, the notion of space only exists on the face of a compass or in the count of steps taken. The world that envelops them in its ultimately deathly embrace becomes a character itself through the evocative photos, vast yet progressively constraining, as if in reply to the arrogance of the balloon that aspired to weightlessness.

Going back in time

White Box is a backwards re-enactment of this daunting survival story that eventually wasn’t one. It will tell the story from the end to the beginning, in keeping with the way in which the photos reached us–confounding, heedless of time.

1930, when the Norwegian crew turns the negatives over to Swedish authorities, is our starting point. Moving backwards, the crew receives the negatives from the officials, returns to White Island, redeposits the film and other objects they found there, hunts walruses before leaving to allow the ice to slowly cover the objects. Then, three men – they look very weak – help each other back up as they go back to their boat, push their sledges back and fill them with packages and objects found on their way. They find their balloon, reinflate it slowly and leave to arrive in Spitzbergen, welcomed as heroes.

By reversing the story, the logic of objects and actions is transformed in both energy and meaning. The resultant absurdity and sometimes comic illogic highlight the poetry of their philosophical journey, but also the vanity of the human being. Like photography reveals images from light exposure with chemical solution, the backwards running of time is able to change weight to lightness, greeting to farewell, arrival to departure, fall to launch, failure to success, death to resurrection, hope to memories, and so on… Rewinding backwards is also a natural process for human beings at the end of their life, taking time as a mirror to look back and conclude life in a panoramic view, where scale and measure are no longer rational but only emotional. It’s a unique momentum of time suspension where legacy emerges.