The Presence of Absence

Pyramiden, June 2016

I had attempted to get to Pyramiden in the winter of 2016 but the sea ice was too impenetrable and so this voyage was my second attempt to land there on board the MS Langøysund.

Pyramiden is a mostly abandoned mining settlement with its infrastructure and buildings still in place. It is located in Bildfjorden, opposite the Nordenskiöld Glacier on the archipelago of Svalbard and was founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927. Owned by the state-owned Russian mining company Arktikugol Trust, who also own the mining settlement of Barentsburg, Pyramiden once had over 1,000 inhabitants. The series of photographs/videos I made on this voyage were an attempt to capture the absence of the presence of a once thriving community.