Edge of Existence | Arild Heitmann & Stian Klo

Purpose

Two photographers who have likely contributed the most to shaping the general public’s contemporary perception of Arctic landscapes.

The photography of Arild Heitmann and Stian Klo belongs to a long history of photographic abstraction, minimalism, and an almost graphic approach to landscape. 

They are heirs to a much broader tradition rooted in a profound contemplation of the landscape—one in which photography gradually breaks free from its descriptive purpose to enter the realm of drawing. Here, the landscape is no longer a scene to be depicted, but a composition of lines, shades of gray, and silences. 

Norwegian ice, fjords, and mountains are no longer merely locations; they become a form of writing, where light serves as ink and the world appears to draw itself.

How to capture the sudden emergence of the marvelous

OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT

This publication is conceived as a landmark photobook on Svalbard, offering a singular and compelling perspective on one of the world’s most remote and rapidly changing territories.

Designed as an art object, the book is intended for readers with a deep appreciation for black-and-white photography and the contemporary landscape tradition. More broadly, it speaks to those who regard photography as more than a means of representation: as a way of questioning our relationship with the natural world, revealing the passage of time, and reflecting on the profound environmental and geopolitical transformations shaping the Arctic today.

Rather than documenting Svalbard, the book proposes an immersive visual experience, one that invites contemplation as much as observation, and positions the landscape as both a physical reality and a metaphor for a world in transition.

INTENTION & ARTISTIC APPROACH

An isolated Norwegian archipelago in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, Svalbard is a glacier-covered polar land that attracts explorers and scientists.

Svalbard is often regarded as a sentinel of climate change. The transformations unfolding there today foreshadow—at an accelerated pace—phenomena that will affect other regions of the world in the coming decades.

This aspect also makes it a profoundly photogenic territory. Images of Svalbard do more than document a spectacular landscape; they bear witness to a changing world where geological memory, ecological fragility, human presence, and geopolitical tensions converge. It is precisely this layering of timeframes—the deep time of glaciers, the historical time of exploration, and the accelerated time of climate change—that imbues Svalbard with exceptional symbolic power.


EDITORIAL & ARTISTIC APPROACH

The book is designed to reflect the two authors’ minimalist quest. It seeks to elevate the graphic dialogue between shapes and lines, to capture the fruitful interplay between the various images, to play with the full range of shades from black to white, and to find a rhythm rooted in the heart of contemplation.

Photographic Abstraction: Representing Less to Reveal More

When Black and White Fosters Abstraction, When Photography Becomes Drawing

Photography was born of a paradox. Conceived to record reality, for a long time its prestige rested on its ability to represent the world faithfully. Abstraction therefore appears as a contradiction: how can an image cease to describe without ceasing to be a photograph?

Unlike painting, photography can never entirely invent its subject. It must begin with a fragment of reality. Photographic abstraction therefore consists in freeing reality from its descriptive function. The viewer no longer sees a mountain, an iceberg or a river, but a line, a surface, a tension, a light. The subject becomes secondary, allowing composition itself to become the true subject.

This is precisely what we find in the work of Arild Heitmann and Stian Klo. Their landscapes do not tell the story of a place. They reveal an organisation of forms, compelling the viewer to attend to volumes, rhythms and tonal values. 

True manifestos of photographic abstraction, their icebergs and mountain peaks become, like Stieglitz's clouds, "equivalents" of emotional states. Photography becomes meditation. Its subject matters less than the inner experience it gives rise to. The surface of a glacier may become a cosmic landscape, a horizon line, a piece of calligraphy. From the infinitely vast emerge genuine pictorial compositions in which we no longer quite know what we are looking at. 

In their minimalist pursuit, they approach the purity of a Hiroshi Sugimoto; and when their landscapes are reduced to two bands of black and white, to a single crease in the sky, or to a few signs—nothing more—their photography becomes almost an idea, and immensity itself becomes silence.

The book specifications

150 B&W photos
Size 30x24,5 cm 
216 pages + ends + cover 

216 pages : 
-> 16 pages (2x8p) printed 1+1 on Ibo Sixties 60gsm (at the beginning of the book) 
-> 16 pages (2x8p) printed 2+2 (2 blacks) on Sirio pearl platinium 120gsm
-> 184 pages (23 x 8p) printed 2+2 on Munken Kristall 150gsm

Case bound book
Sections sewn

Graphic Designer
Juliane Cordes

Timeline

Funding > october-november-december 2026
Production > january-february 2027
Availability > spring 2027
Deliveries to the contributors > by the end of April 2027
Worldwide release in bookshops > october 2027