Kiliii Yüyan on Utqiagvik

“Nanuq Skin” and “Drying Ugrut,” they are two words that you see the “r”  in Iñupiaq (Iñupiatun), and a Nanuqis a polar bear and an Ugrut is a bearded seal. I was walking around in Utqiagvik one day and I met my friend Evelyn, and outside of her house she was drying a Nanuqskin as well as she had a bench of drying bearded seal meat, and so it’s just sort of like a wonderful glimpse into daily life in the Arctic. 

Her family is very subsistence-based, and her son is one of the great whaling captains of the Utqiagvik area and so it’s no surprise to see so much of the land and so much subsistence food, hanging right outside the house. For Iñupiat, life is really lived very much in concert with the outdoors, and the outdoors sort of just bleeds seamlessly to people’s dwellings. 

With the portrait of Foster Simmonds at Nuvuk, Foster is an important elder in Utqiagvik, and one of the things that I love about him is just that he’s always one of those elders who has stories, stories of survival, stories of his parents and his grandparents. But he came to visit us out on the sea ice one day. He was often out there with the whalers and came out one day to just sit down and tell us stories and just watch for the whales. And I took the opportunity to make a portrait of him out there, so I took a light stand and a strobe and had to hammer that into the ice, or tether it down to the sea ice, and make a few portraits of him out in that really beautiful space.

Being out on the sea ice is really an incredible environment. It’s such a completely different environment than Southerners had ever been part of. And so photographing Foster out in that environment is very much what it means to be Iñupiaq, so that was a very appropriate place.