Tuktoyaktuk
In October 2024, I travelled to Tuktoyaktuk or ‘Tuk’, an Inuvialuit village located beyond the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories, bordering the Arctic Ocean. The village is built on tundra, where no trees grow and there is virtually no relief apart from a few pingos (ice hills). In winter, the night stretches on for more than a month and a half and it’s not unusual for temperatures to drop below -50°C. Here I met people marked by the cold and by history, proud of their village and of this nature that they know better than anyone else.
I photographed these people and their homes, the tundra, the ocean that is slow to become pack ice, the permafrost that is melting and whose erosion is causing the inevitable disappearance of the territory. The sea is rising and the summer is getting longer, so in 20 to 30 years’ time, Tuktoyaktuk as we know it today will no longer exist and the land where the houses stand will be submerged. I photographed a place that will soon be no more.
Tuktoyaktuk is not a symbol, it is reality. Its inhabitants are likely to become Canada’s first climate refugees, and some houses have already been moved.
Beauty is not necessarily visible at first glance; you have to wait, talk and listen. Poetry then emerges, from a wall lined with photos, from the red and silver mud, or from Wayne looking through his binoculars without ever tiring of it.
