Bjorn Stig Hansen
Copenhagen, Denmark
I graduated from The Danish School of Media and Journalism in 2009 and was in my early twenties when I became interested in photography. My first attempt with the photo-journalistic genre took place in a dim hotel room inside the red light district of Mexico City. Since these early photographs of a Mexican transvestite I have attempted to expose social inequality through photography. In recent years I have devoted most of my time exploring the human consequences of climate change. It began in 2009 when I traveled to the Carteret Islands in the Solomon Sea and lived with the locals for a month to research a story about climate-induced migration. The same year I invited an island chief from the islands to speak at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and have stayed in contact ever since. In 2011 I began photographing in Greenland and plan to return shortly to continue my work about climate-driven environmental changes and their consequences.
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The Arctic Farm
Bjorn Stig Hansen
While the prospect of the Arctic ice melting and submerging low lying regions might be a great concern to millions, people in the southern fjords of Greenland welcome the warmer climate which has made potato farming profitable. During the summer of 2011 a gang of 11 workers harvested 28 tons of potatoes by the Sermilik Fjord north of Narsaq – something that would have been unthinkable just a few generations ago, when the climate was colder. Most of the work was done by hand, as the pristine rocky soil prevented the potato harvester from picking the potatoes. Although the Greenlanders are traditionally hunters and their primary source of food is still fish and mammals from the local marine ecosystem, climate change is forcing them to adapt in order to provide for themselves. As the ice gets thinner and disappears faster for each year that passes, hunting gets more difficult for both animals and humans, who must travel on the ice to catch their prey.
Tulun
Bjorn Stig Hansen
400 hundred years ago a flotilla of canoes crossed the 80 km (49.7 miles) of open sea between Bougainville and the Tulun Islands in the Solomon Sea. The tribe’s isolated existence on the islands ever since has helped preserve customs and beliefs now lost where they originated from. Within a few generations the islands are expected to be submerged by the rising sea forcing the 1000 islanders to search for new land.
A selection of 80 pictures and a personal account from my two visits to the Tulun Islands will be published under the title A South Pacific Exodus late 2011. Stay updated via