Daniel Dorsa Shoots Greenland’s Youth

The idea sparked on Instagram. In 2022, a high school friend of the photographer’s, now a microbiologist, posted images from Greenland, where she was tracking how microbes in glacial meltwater change from source to ocean. Her research team takes its name, S.I.L.A., from the Inuit concept of sila, which denotes both the physical world and a spiritual way of living within it.

Daniel Dorsa pitched the story to the American press, was turned down, and went anyway. “Greenland is often seen in the United States and much of the western world as a desolate expanse of ice,” he writes. “This project challenges that notion.” His landing in Kangerlussuaq, in the spring of 2023, could almost have proven him wrong.

“Snow and strong winds from the north pelt the plane as it lands on the cold war era tarmac, twenty-five kilometers from the ice sheet,” he notes. The scientists’ work resists him, offering little to photograph. Worn down by years of assignments, the photographer falls back on an old instinct, inherited from skateboarding: let the place dictate the looking, with no plan set in advance.

The country’s raw whiteness strikes him first. “White is not actually a color, but the encapsulation of all the visible wavelengths of light,” he writes. His lens then turns to the wooden houses painted blue, red, and yellow, which cut against the snow with a graphic boldness. Then come the faces, alongside the human connections he forges. And the book turns a corner.

A young woman with turquoise dreadlocks tilts her chin toward the sky, a fly inked beneath her jaw, three words tattooed across her throat: Master of Disaster. This is far from the familiar image of the Inuit. Other scenes extend the same gaze. Four young men in sneakers pose with beers in hand and cigarettes between their lips, in front of a construction site. Two shirtless teenagers, in full summer sun, balance on one another in an acrobatic pose.

Elsewhere, a young woman lies in the grass in Nuuk, white sneakers on her feet, wearing a dreamy expression. On graduation day, students in embroidered vests and white caps dance in a circle, arm in arm. Daniel Dorsa looks at this youth without condescension. “This place hardens you, after all. You grow up quick when nothing is guaranteed to you. The only things you can rely on are the elements,” he writes in the text accompanying the book.

Among the encounters that stand out, Nava holds a place apart. The young woman runs a hostel in Sisimiut with her stepmother. Openly queer, born into a family of dog sledders, she takes the photographer out on a snowmobile in -22°F weather. “As we rode through the mountains, nearly invisible bumps in the snow bounced me around like a drunk cowboy on a mechanical bull,” he recounts.

That evening, the young woman asks him to photograph her in her traditional furs. Daniel Dorsa, who is normally wary of images that exoticize their subject, agrees anyway, and counts this portrait among his favorites in the book. Nava’s pride, standing in her sealskin, disarms the cliché with its soft tones.

Color, elsewhere in the book, follows an inverse logic: bright primaries clash against the white, while somber duotones, emptied of people, interrupt the tumult like rests in a musical score. The object itself extends this logic of contrast. The silkscreened cover disappears beneath a translucent vellum jacket, on which Clint Woodside, founder of Deadbeat Club, had excerpts from Daniel Dorsa’s journal printed: the text overlays the image before the book is even opened.

Because politics has a way of intruding where least expected, that winter the American president, Donald Trump, reaffirmed his intention to annex Greenland, by force if necessary. Daniel Dorsa wonders whether that is why twelve-year-old Miki refuses to have his portrait taken, before putting himself in the boy’s place: “I can’t blame him if so. I’d probably think I was a spy too.”

A few days later, in Nuuk, his friend Inuuteq drives past the city’s maximum security prison. Does the word freedom, as the West understands it, even mean anything in the Arctic? “Americans are the only people in the world that love to talk about freedom,” he states. “But, the only people I’ve ever heard speak about freedom are prisoners.”

**To Skip a Sinking Stone by Daniel Dorsa is published by Deadbeat Club Press and available for pre-order for $65.
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