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HERE: A place-based polar image bridge
You are invited to participate in this interactive digital exhibition at the 2025 Polar Educators International Conference in Boulder, Colorado, part of the Arctic Science Summit 2025 Co-curated by Julia Dooley Adam Fung Emily Artinian Carol Maurer DATES 22nd and 23rd March: conference presentation. See conference website for more details. From 22nd March and permanently thereafter: Street Road website presentation (on this page) DEADLINE + HOW: Submit your image by June 30, 2025 (extended deadline). by email to [email protected] Please email us with any enquiries, for purchasing information, and to visit by appointment, including virtual visits. |
Polar photography has tended to frame the Arctic and Antarctic: (1) as object over subject; (2) as monumental; (3) as otherworldly and unreachable; and (4) as terrain to conquer or a challenge to overcome. These tendencies contribute to a profound distancing – the polar regions indeed exist as an Ultima Thule in the minds of many of our planet’s inhabitants, or worse – for an extractive elite – as a blank-slate 'resource' awaiting 'development'.
Many are also unaware that for the more than four million people living in the Arctic, a large number of whom are Indigenous, these high latitude lands are known well and deeply as home. Against the backdrop of such mythical framings it becomes impossible to understand the poles of our planet as being part of integral, fluid sets of interlocking, interdependent ecosystems. Without this understanding we cannot easily place ourselves, our behaviours, and our beliefs in a changing planetary system. HERE: A place-based polar image bridge therefore offers a space in which to consider – through an aesthetic and kinaesthetic approach – the ways our own personal locations can be re-thought, re-framed, and re-imagined as having a direct relationship with Earth's dynamic systems, which are, in turn, interdependent with the polar regions. We invite you – conference attendees, Street Road's audiences, and anyone in the wider public – to submit polar-connected photographs from your personal daily lives for inclusion in the exhibition. By seeking out polar-linked imagery in the same spaces as your own local ecosystems, we encourage you to bridge the space between your own understanding of your everyday place and to make direct affective connections to polar places. We believe that through accessible aesthetic acts such as this it is possible to see our daily actions in the context of global climate change, to better envision our own personal impact on the earth, and to see ourselves as part of a global ecosystem, interconnected across massive distances. By sourcing imagery from a broad spectrum of participants we also aim cast a wide net and so gather multiple perspectives, experiences, and understandings of the contemporary moment. Collected images are compiled together into a film, slowly fading from one to the next, thus creating human bridges between and across landscapes, both real and implied, and challenging colonialist ideologies to consider a deeper understanding of place-based knowledge. What truly is HERE? HERE: a place based polar image bridge
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