Fine Art Photographer Returns to Greenland to Photograph Climate Change Five Years Later

Funded by a Second Grant, Collaborative Photo Project Captures
Haunting Beauty of Melting Glaciers at Night and Will Donate NFTs

Artist returns to photograph changing glaciers at night five years later, partnering with indigenous people and supported by a second American-Scandinavian Foundation grant.
NFTs will be made and portions of sales going to indigenous groups.
Giovinco identifies as someone with disabilities, having psoriatic arthritis and fibromyalgia.

Fine art photographer Steve Giovinco returns to Greenland to photograph glaciers five years later to see how the landscape has changed. Beyond documentation, the goal is to convey a surreal portrait of a changing primordial landscape through eerie and evocative night photographs. Working directly with native Greenlandic people is key for the project where members of the community will help identify specific points of climate change occurring in their land. This kind of cross-cultural collaboration is essential and will help the work have a lasting impact. The project is supported by a second American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant and runs from August 12 through September 7, 2021.

“Since climate change is hard to grasp, my hope is that evocative night photographs will help promote this crisis,” says Yale-trained New York fine art photographer Steve Giovinco who spent a month in the tiny settlement of Narsarsuaq, Southern Greenland in 2016.

In probably a first for Greenland, Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs will be made from some of the photos, and portions of any sales will go to indigenous groups or local environmental causes in perpetuity. Also, part of photo print sales will be donated and some of the projects will be live-streamed.

Working in darkness requires exposures ranging from several minutes to an hour or more, making it impossible to see through the camera’s viewfinder. Instead, Giovinco stands beside it “feeling” the image and intuitively framing it in the dark.

“Photographing alone at night can be meditative, revelatory, and sometimes terrifying in the primordial beauty; sometimes making me feel like I am disappearing into the land,” says Giovinco.

The photographer identifies as someone with disabilities, since he has psoriatic arthritis and fibromyalgia, making the physicality of the trip especially challenging.

After returning to New York, exhibitions in galleries and museums will be arranged, and a book of photographs is being made. His first Greenlandic trip resulted in an article in the popular online site Vice, having a photograph included in the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, and conducted an Instagram Take Over.

Steve Giovinco
166 Second Avenue
11H
New York, NY 10003

Steve Giovinco is a New York-based photographer. Tracing environmental change, his work focuses on eerie long exposure night landscape images. Public and private collections including his photographs are the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the California Museum of Photography. Exhibitions of his work include the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia; Winnipeg Art Gallery; White Columns; Sadler’s Wells, London; Gyeongnam Art Museum, Korea. He’s a Fulbright Fellow Alternate, attended artist residencies at Yaddo, and received numerous grants. He was commissioned by one of the first blockchain art platforms, Monegraph. Giovinco earned an MFA from Yale University.

This release was published on openPR.