The Arctic is a land of elemental contrasts, a place of both sublime beauty and unforgiving harshness. From the heat and endless light of summer to the punishing cold and deep blue nights of winter, its great organic oneness has been admired and celebrated, as humans have sought to share an existence with, and exert an influence on, its lands and seas. In this photographic essay, John Bockstoce presents vivid images from four decades of sailing, researching, and photographing in Alaska and the North Pacific, the Canadian Arctic, and the North Atlantic. Bockstoce's photographs convey his passion for the stark solitude of land, sky, water, and ice, his admiration for the lives and livelihoods of the Arctic's inhabitants, and his fascination with the haunting traces of a fragile human presence in the Far North. "John Bockstoce is a great Arctic traveler in the earlier, harder sense of that term. He completed the long-sought Northwest Passage, a journey of unparalleled achievement. Starting in an Inuit skin boat at Nome, Alaska, he navigated eastward through ice-choked Canadian waters to the misty headlands of Holsteinsborg, West Greenland. He then sailed south along Labrador's coast to New York. John is an outstanding photographer and author and a true northern voyager." - James Houston, O.C.
Arctic historian and archaeologist, John R. Bockstoce has been traveling and working in the North since 1962. He has carried out a series of excavations at Bering Strait and served for ten seasons as a member of an Eskimo whaling crew at Point Hope, Alaska. In the 1970s he descended the Tanana and Yukon rivers by canoe from Fairbanks to Nome and traveled along the coast from there to Barrow Strait in arctic Canada. Later he twice traversed the Northwest Passage by boat.
He is the author of many books, monographs, and articles, including Arctic Passages: A Unique Small Boat Voyage through the Great Northern Waterway(1991, 1992), Arctic Discoveries: Images from Voyages of Four Decades in the North (2000), High Latitude, North Atlantic: 30,000 Miles through Cold Seas and History (2003), and the award-winning Whales, Ice and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (1986, 1995). The University of Alaska recently conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Science in recognition of his contributions to Arctic studies.
