Intimacy and Isolation
Eva Crocker
At this summer’s Bonavista Biennale, photographers Inuuteq Storch and Ethan Murphy will show work that explores how living in remote communities impacts peoples’ relationships to each other and the natural world. Raised in Greenland and Newfoundland respectively, Storch and Murphy each studied photography in large cities, but were drawn home to capture their unique island cultures. Greenland and Newfoundland’s landscapes are remarkably alike. They share dramatic coastlines dotted with brightly coloured wooden houses and fishing structures. Icebergs float by, flora is scruffy, and there are long seasons of snow and ice. Partly, the similarities between Storch and Murphy’s work can be attributed to the resemblance between the severe natural environments they document. However, the more significant parallel is how the harsh beauty of these landscapes shape the communities they photograph and informs their ethos as artists.
Inuuteq Storch, Soon Will Summer Be Over (2023), photograph. Image courtesy of the artist and Wilson Saplana Gallery. Cover design by Graham Blair.
Describing his series, Keepers of the Ocean, Storch writes, “The intimacy we have is created by the nature we are surrounded with, rough and honest. The weather controls everything and the nature gives us everything we need.”
While people are often conspicuously absent or obscured in Murphy’s images, Storch’s series include a lot of portraits. People crammed together in the backseat of a truck or the stern of a fishing boat, faces pressed close, arms around each other. Keepers of the Ocean documents life in Storch’s hometown of Sisimiut. In addition to the subjects’ physical intimacy, there’s a comfortable familiarity with the photographer too. In one image we see a close up of someone taking a bite of pizza, making eye contact with the camera. Another is taken over the shoulder of someone washing their hands. The subject’s body and the lower half of their face is reflected in two mirrors, the shot divided by a shelf cluttered with make-up, toothbrushes, and toothpaste. The artist has crowded into the bathroom to photograph this mundane act. Another is taken from the top of a bunk bed, someone is sticking their head out of the bottom bunk, looking up at the camera, clothes piled on the floor below. Storch’s images capture warmth and affection in moments that might otherwise go unnoticed.
In the Guardian, Storch writes about his time studying at the International Center of Photography, “I lived for a time in New York and believed I was going to stay there for many years. But I quickly realised most of the photographs I wanted to take were in Greenland, so I went home and started capturing the Greenlandic lifestyle.”
Primarily populated by Inuit, Greenland was colonized by Denmark in the 1700s, and many of the early photographs of the island were taken by settlers. Storch uses found photography, family archives, and his own images to show Greenlandic culture from a Greenlandic perspective. In Nordic Art Review, Storch says, “My projects are basically about identity. My own identity and our national identity as Greenlandic people . . . I find that my own identity is tied up with the broader national conversation about who we are as people.”
Keepers of the Ocean captures everyday life in Sisimiut in a way that feels honest and natural, as well as political. The pictures appear unposed. The subjects look as though the photographer has just caught their attention. Some are asleep. Stylish young people lounge at home or hang outdoors. Storch’s candid portrait style contrasts with the long history of stiff, posed photographs of Greenlandic people taken by colonizers. He documents his own world with refreshing artistry and authenticity.
Murphy also explores the relationship between place and identity in his work. Murphy’s interest in photography grew out of making skate videos as a teenager with a borrowed handy cam. When Murphy injured himself and had to take a break from skateboarding, it led him to invest in his first film camera. He said he quickly became obsessed with getting photographs developed by the one-hour photo studios that no longer exist in St. John’s. This phase would lead him to study photography at Toronto Metropolitan University. However, during his time on the mainland, Murphy found the subject matter that felt most important to him was life in Newfoundland.
Murphy credits skateboarding as his introduction to using a camera and more importantly, instilling a set of values that define his work today. Skating helped Murphy develop an eye for viewing his surroundings differently (he still finds himself observing concrete ledges and seeing their potential as skate spots). But more importantly, the skate culture he grew up in was all about making use of what surrounds you in unexpected ways. It’s the ethos at the center of all his work, including his most recent series, no guts, no glory.
no guts, no glory is composed of photographs from remote communities in Ireland and Newfoundland. Murphy hopes to expand the project to include more isolated places on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Many of the places he visited were either very small islands or parts of the coast only accessible by boat. In an interview for this piece, Murphy said, “I was talking to someone in Ireland and they were saying how for a lot of islanders, the island is the center point and the mainland is the outside domain. They travel into the island and out to the mainland . . . that relationship to landscape and environment is integral to the work I’m making.”
Of the experience of visiting small communities to take photographs Murphy says, “. . . methodology is really important to me as a photographer. A lot of the time, it’s more important to just meet people and allow things to happen at the pace they happen, to not force things. To have reciprocal relationships, like they have with their neighbours and participate . . . it really takes time to understand a place.”
The time Murphy spent in these remote places had a profound impact on him. He was struck by the commitment to a way of life that requires people to rely on each other and the landscape that surrounds them. Murphy noted that people in the communities he visited in Newfoundland face challenges in accessing healthcare and clean drinking water, as well as difficulties related to supply chains and a lack of food security.
Ethan Murphy, Low Tide (2024), photograph, sizes variable.
He says, “I think the way people live in some of these places, their values are important to consider on a larger scale. I have a lot of respect and admiration for the hard work and the attitudes of people who live in more remote places where at times the odds are stacked against them. People in these places are just really community oriented and willing to work together.”
A photo taken in Oliver’s Cove, Tilting on Fogo Island, shows someone lowering a chainsaw to a pile of wood that’s gone silver with age. A bright red quad sits half outside of the frame, and a fence made of the same silver logs separates the subject from a rolling field of dried, yellow grass. The image conveys both the expansiveness of the landscape and the skilled physical labour required to live there. Another image shows the bodies of seven bright white rabbits on the hood of a silver car parked on the side of a snowy highway, near the turn off for Fogo Island. In rural Newfoundland, it’s common to see people selling hunted meat and salt-beef or buckets of foraged berries from a car on the side of the road. Murphy’s striking image speaks to the resourcefulness of people who eke sustenance out of the land on an island with harsh winds and very little topsoil.
The focus on not only making due with what is available but seeing the beauty in it, resonates with Storch’s found photography practice. In an interview with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Storch describes hanging out at night in the local dump with a friend who worked there, and happening upon five or six films abandoned in a dumpster. Storch recognized the potential for an art project in the trash. He said, “Found images and archival projects developed into a project where I actually want to tell the Greenlandic history from a Greenlandic perspective.”
The found films were made in the late 1990s and early 2000s by someone only a couple of years older than Storch. Because the country has changed so much in recent years, Storch said the world depicted in the films feels very different from his own experience of Greenland.
Storch’s Porcelain Souls continues the work of using found photographs, in this case from a very personal archive, to tell a recent history of Greenland through a decolonial lens. The book is a collection of photographs his parents took and letters they exchanged, mementos spanning from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. In an interview with lomography Storch said, “A lot of the photos we usually see from our history are from foreigners’ eyes. If you think about the Western way of living and the Arctic way of living, they are very very different. If [you and I] go somewhere, and the next day we talk about it, I think we would end up with very different [stories]. That’s how I see a lot of the documentation of our history.”
In Porcelain Souls, photographs of the landscape are interspersed with those of people in domestic and social spaces, as well as people interacting with the natural world; the presence of so many shots of personless landscapes in a family album emphasizes the relationship between people and the environment that surrounds them. The landscape is a significant part of the family history, as told by this photo series.
One photograph shows a wooden house perched on a small hill above a bay filled with ice pans, the water turned psychedelic pink and purple by a setting or rising sun. In another, six boats with tall masts sit in a small harbour packed with ice, smoke rising from wooden houses on the snowy hills behind. Another is taken from the side of a steep cliff, looking down on two boats floating in a narrow passage, a black cliff bisected by an arm of fog that rises out of the water on the opposite side of the channel.
While Murphy’s images emphasize the labour involved in rural life, many of the photos in Porcelain Souls depict peaceful vistas and moments of relaxation or playfulness. One photo shows three children grinning on the edge of a cliff with an iceberg floating just off the coast behind them. A crusty, rust coloured moss covers the ground beneath them and across the bay, navy-coloured hills are disappearing into fog. This image is from a time when having your picture taken held a different weight than it does in an age when taking endless digital photos has become a widespread phenomenon. The children in the iceberg photo are hamming it up—they are posed like musicians on an album cover and we can feel the silly energy busting out of their smiles. The giddiness feels like a response to the formality associated with being photographed pre-camera phone. The jokey posing also communicates a sense of ease that comes from knowing the person on the other side of the camera.
Storch’s exploration of found footage and family archives is a way of making sense of how quickly life in Greenland has changed over the course of a couple of generations. In lomography, Storch says about his family’s photos, “. . . in Greenland, our development has been very fast. So it’s very difficult for me to imagine or understand how life was when my parents were young. Even more difficult with my grandparents. So working on these, it helped quite a lot, understanding.”
Murphy also uses photography to understand family history in a way that is both deeply personal, and speaks to a broader cultural and political reality. Murphy describes his series What’s Left & What’s Gathered as a conservation with his late father, ten years after his passing. Many of the photos in the series were taken at a cabin left to Murphy and his sister by their father. The images’ titles are borrowed from poetry Murphy discovered in his father’s notebooks after his passing.
“We Hung Around in Circles” shows a bright orange fire burning in a lush green forest in the daytime. A shovel leans against the trunk of a nearby tree. A jacket hangs on a branch above it. The fire is encircled by boulders and the image is framed by a cracked palette on one side. On the other, a kitchen chair faces the fire, tilted backwards on the uneven, mossy ground. This tableau is full of life, the vibrant forest and the roaring fire, the empty jacket suggesting the person tending the blaze has just stepped outside the frame. The jacket is a powerful evocation of how grieving someone often means feeling their presence in their absence.
The people who do appear in this series are mostly obscured, often in unusual ways. “As the Transparency Ends,” shows someone climbing through a window above a deck. The paint of the deck is faded, one board is cracked. Many of the railings are wonky, tree branches have forced their way between them. We have a feeling this cabin has been sitting empty for some time. The subject’s head and shoulders are inside the cabin, one knee rests on the frame of the window, the other leg hangs down, slightly blurry with motion. They are launching themself inside, passing into a world that is inaccessible to the viewer. The title suggests the end of a liminal stage, the subject will land in a place where things either become concrete or invisible.
“I Lost My Head Instead,” shows someone standing in an empty closet, arms hanging by their sides. The subject’s head is tilted forward and hidden behind what seems to be a sheet of moulding plywood leaned against the closet rod. Empty hangers dangle askew on either side of the subject. There is something disturbing about their strange posture. Like in “As the Transparency Ends,” the subject is disappearing into the unknown.
There are a number of photos in the series where people appear in abandoned spaces without being completely visible to the viewer. At one level these images are about how to remain in dialogue with those who have passed away, how their presence lingers in spaces that were important to them. However, they also capture the pain of being unable to communicate with the deceased, to ask them questions about themselves, or in the case of Murphy, who lost his father when he was a teenager, to tell them about the person you have become.
What’s Left & What’s Gathered is about a very personal experience of loss but the images also speak to the broader context of a province struggling with the collapse of an industry that defined its culture. In the context of Newfoundland, Murphy’s abandoned interiors evoke resettlement and mass out-migration. Since the Northern Cod Moratorium was announced in 1992, Newfoundland and Labrador has maintained the highest per capita unemployment rate in the country. The lack of opportunities in the province has forced many people to leave their homes behind in order to seek employment elsewhere. Newfoundlanders like Murphy, who grew up in the wake of the moratorium, have lived with older generations’ nostalgia for a time before the closure of the fishery, and questions about what life would be like on the island had trawlers not scraped the ocean floor and effectively wiped out the Northern Cod population. Empty houses in rural Newfoundland are a physical manifestation of all the people who were forced to leave the island.
Storch and Murphy are both interested in the connections created in isolation in harsh, yet generous natural environments. Their images bring us into the private sphere of the home and explore familial connections by incorporating their parents’ voices into their own work. Both photographers are not only interested in intimate relationships between people in remote places, but also people’s unique relationships to the natural world in their respective homes. Storch’s Keepers of the Ocean, includes a self-portrait where he is laying on the ground looking up at the camera. His head and shoulders rest in a patch of daisies, a dreamy, almost mischievous look on his face. Murphy has a self-portrait in What’s Left & What’s Gathered; he’s resting in a chair that’s been tipped over so its back is on grassy forest floor. Murphy’s head and shoulders are on the ground, tree branches stretching above him. The camera looks down at Murphy from a slight incline, so we see the top of his head and eyebrows but his face isn’t completely visible. Yet, he seems peaceful. The similarities between these portraits speak to an artistic affinity, but also to the artists’ reverence for the landscapes that shaped their practice.
Eva Crocker is the author of two novels, All I Ask, and Back in the Land of the Living, and the short story collection Barrelling Forward. Her new short story collection Bargain Bargain Bargain will be published by McCelland and Stewart in 2026. She is a PhD Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University.