Various plates from Alfred Gabriel Nathorst’s Spitsbergen Expedition of 1898, as pictured by the Swedish mineralogist and photographer Axel Hamberg. By the time Nathorst reached these distant Arctic shores in the late 19th century, European explorers, scientists, whalers and trappers had already been voyaging here for over three centuries since the archipelago’s discovery in 1596 by the crew of the White Swan under the command of Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz. This is made all the more obvious by Hamberg’s pictures of graves as well as the abandoned launch site of S.A. Andrée’s doomed 1897 air-balloon expedition at Virgohamna on Danes Island. While there is much vacant space in Hamberg’s views, the most interesting images are those that show the crew of Nathorst’s 1898 expedition in their comportment towards a polar horizon that remains all too human. Thus, just as in the photographs of similar expeditions from this period, Hamberg does not simply disguise Svalbard’s coastline as an immaculate ‘terra nullius’ of glaciers and snow-capped peaks, but recognises its landscape as a cultural ecology of desolation and wonder, grief and hope, peril and adventure, accomplishment and flounder. Amidst this far-flung horizon of rounded-points and about-turns, on this earth the perfect landscape does not exist. Hamberg does not pretend that it does. Images available in the public domain, as sourced from the online Alvin National Digital Cultural Heritage Platform. Found via @peter_holliday #nowherediary