Inuvik Airport in the age of Covid-19: planes arriving nearly empty, passenger registration, wipes, masks, and plexi partitions.

Last week I photographed my colleagues from the Inuvik Fire Department at the self-isolation facility set up in the Mackenzie Hotel while they fogged rooms with medical grade viricide. Room decontamination is a preventative measure to ensure safety of staff and guests staying at the facility.  Since the Northwest Territories borders were closed on March 22nd to prevent spread of Covid-19, everyone entering the territory has to undergo a 14-day quarantine in Yellowknife, Inuvik, Fort Smith, or Hay River. Returning residents are not allowed to self-isolate in the smaller communities to avoid overwhelming local health centres if they turned out to be infected,  and to ensure that they are close to a hospital for the duration of their 14-day self-isolation. So far there have been 5 cases of Covid-19 in the Northwest Territories, including 1 in Inuvik.

These images are a part of a documentation project commissioned by the Government of the Northwest Territories. 

A small selection of my favourite images from  this year’s 6633 Arctic Ultra. If you’d like to know more or see more photos, go to the race gallery in my portfolio. If you are nuts enough to do it, you can register for next year’s 6633 Arctic Ultra here.

A small set if images from my photoshoot with Chevonne of the Yukon, burlesque performer and educator, as well as a co-founder and producer of Dawson City’s Boardwalk Burlesque. The photos were taken in the Westminster Hotel, an eclectic space with crooked floors, filled with a mix of furniture from the last 100 years. The Westminster, established at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, is the oldest Dawson City business operating in its original location.

The Inuvik Community Greenhouse in January. Some plants look like summer ended yesterday but they are all frozen solid, leaves brittle like glass.

A family photo shoot from December 2019. These photos were taken just a couple of days before the polar night set in so we scheduled it around the few precious hours of daylight available at that time of year.

A small, subjective selection of my favourite shots from the Sunrise Festival. 

Here are some previously unshared photos from last summer. In July I had a unique opportunity to travel to Paulatuk, Northwest Territories with researchers from University of Lisbon and Natural Resources Canada. Their objective was to map the community and nearby sites along the coastline, mine - to photograph the process. Paulatuk is a fly-in community of roughly 260 people, located on Amundsen Gulf. Data collected during the drone surveys will allow to create high quality 3D models of the area. It will also be used as ground truthing data for analyzing satellite imagery. You can read more about the technical aspects of the mission here.  

A small set of photos from a visit to my home city of Warsaw in January. I bought a Fuji X100F specifically for that trip (and as an everyday carry camera) and now I honestly don’t know how I lived without it. There are a billion detailed reviews of this camera on the internet so you can look it up if you’re curious. I can just say that for me it lives up to the hype. Although you can get amazing images from smartphones these days, I still like the idea of having a “real” camera on me, mainly because I am yet to see a smartphone that holds up to the winter cold in Northern Canada, and I hate dealing with touch screens in below zero temperatures. 

Ryszard Barylinski is a third-generation artisan brush maker. The brush shop on Poznanska street has been a fixture in Warsaw landscape since early 1950s. I dropped by there to pick up a couple of shoe polishing brushes. I asked if I could take a few photos. We ended up talking about cameras, brushes, and the history of the family brush shop, established by Ryszard’s grandfather.  

Hello world, this is my first blog post. I decided to start a photography blog to have a feed with my photography exploits that is independent of social media.  So here we are. If you are looking for a blog that will ruminate over how it’s cold in the Arctic and everything is expensive, you are in the wrong place (but if you have questions about the North feel free to drop me a line). Enjoy!