Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s Lemonade Igloo

For a couple of months, I lived in Igloolik, one of the most northern Inuit settlements of Nunavut, Canada, in the fall of 2007. One of the things that really struck me there was the generation gap. Younger people living a more Western lifestyle with their Facebook accounts and drinking soft drinks and lemonade, and the elderly with their traditional way of life are still able to survive the Arctic and still able to build an igloo out of ice.

I decided to combine both the young and the old to merge them into one image: the lemonade igloo. The igloo is made out of blocks of frozen lemonade built by an elderly Inuit man in his wolf outfit. You can see him leaning against the igloo.

We built the igloo next to an elementary school. This way, the kids could use it as a hangout—until the summer came and melted the igloo away. I like the splash of color, the bright orange in the middle of the white Arctic landscape.