N Magazine's chief photographer travels to Greenland

Written by Brian Bushard

Photography by Kit Noble

While Noble could have stayed on Nantucket this August, he instead chose the 40-degree tundra north of the Arctic Circle, where sled dogs outnumber people and there’s no road out of town. He might be the first Nantucketer to visit this part of the world. “As soon as you get off the plane, you can smell the ice,” said Noble, N Magazine’s chief photographer who has called Nantucket home for the past 15 years. “It’s hard to explain. It’s almost like sticking your face in the freezer.”

This wasn’t an ordinary vacation, but one of a series of photography excursions that have brought Noble to the ends of the Earth. Several years ago, he traveled to Patagonia for a photo tour of the southern tip of South America. He’s also been to Machu Picchu in Peru, Costa Rica, Iceland, India, South Africa, Vietnam and the open ocean. The purpose of these trips is not to relax in the comfort of a luxury resort, but to explore a new part of the world and capture something he’s never seen before. He’s sightseeing through the lens of his Sony.

For the first four days of the trip, he’s solo, wandering down hiking trails that line the shoreline of Disko Bay in western Greenland. The walks take him to an alien landscape, a twisting ice fjord and a sea of icebergs floating and shifting throughout the day, at some points profoundly still and at others cracking as they collide and collapse. “They’re beautiful, peaceful and quiet, but they have these incredible explosions that sound like a thunder clap,” Noble said.

"It washes away the day-to-day anxiety,” he added. At some point during this four-plus-hour dusk, he sits down at a local restaurant for beef from southern Greenland, brought hundreds of miles north by boat. Greenland is not at the top of the list for travelers for good reason. It never gets hot, there’s no swimming, no beaches and limited options for nightlife. There’s also no true night for that matter when the sun never sets—though in the winter, there’s hardly any daylight.

It’s a world of extremes. Author Annie Dillard once dared “people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips” to “film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them.”

The territory (a part of Denmark) has been on Noble’s bucket list for over five years. Several days into the trip, he hops on one of two nearly identical red sailboats with a group of photographers who have made the trip to Ilulissat—a coastal town on Disko Bay—from around the world. They come from France, the Netherlands, Vietnam and all over the U.S. in search of the midnight sun.

In an hour, they’re within spitting distance of the fjords, glaciers and icebergs, a backdrop in a part of the world Noble has not quite seen before. This is the grand finale. He looks into the viewfinder on his Sony. The photos are otherworldly—a sea of warehouse-sized icebergs, humpback whales and seagulls. This is the moment he’s been waiting for.

“I always tell people that I’m really fortunate having chosen photography as my career because it’s my work, as well as a passion,” he said. “Using my camera on a trip like this is very different from going to a job.”