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Among the 24 exhibitions presented this year at the Visa pour l'image festival, Louie Palu's festival. This Canadian photojournalist photographed military training in the Arctic for four years. A rare report on the challenges of our time, realized in extreme conditions. Interview.
From our special envoys in Perpignan,
RFI : You came to Perpignan this year to present your work on the Arctic. You have been on military operations for thousands of kilometers for four years in the cold, both in northern Canada and in the northern United States. How did you find yourself there?
Louie Palu: I started covering conflicts around 2004. My parents were children during the Second World War. At the table, they said to me: " Do not you like what you are given to eat? We, during the war, had nothing. Being able to imagine what a war looked like helped me to chart my own path, especially the Arctic.
► See also: Visa for the image: photographing the environmental emergency in Africa
I started working on the Arctic in 1993. I grew up hunting and fishing with my dad in northern Ontario, our province. I was, in a way, built for the cold, to realize this project, for this precise moment. My quarter-century of running the world to follow conflict has also dragged me.
During the Cold War, there was an early warning system, a chain of radars built to anticipate a possible Russian disaster attack by the North Pole, which never arrived. In many ways, it has always been the great uncertainty, the Arctic. But what happens there will affect us all: this is the place most affected by climate change. We must visualize this reality.
I do not think we're going to shoot at it up there, but I think we're back to some of the tensions we've had before. For various obvious reasons: different governments, regimes that are not alike - I will not make any country the naughty of this story. But what happens is that the Earth is round, and neither resources nor space are eternal.
New shipping routes are opening up in the Far North. Your work, which could have been a work of magazine, documentary, is almost transformed into work of news. The news is accelerating ?
Unable to go there, people imagine the Arctic through polar bears, ice, snow, emptiness, perhaps the natives, the Inuit. But that does not go further. I think when people look at my pictures, they think it's way different from the Arctic they imagined. Sometimes I'm told about penguins, I have to answer: " That's the South Pole, the other pole! "
What we have to imagine is this incredible future, dark in some respects, where a whole new ocean will open, where people can travel. This moment in history is out of proportion with anything in the past. It was a place where you could not go: now crews can. What does this mean for the safety of the environment and our world?
There is the diffuse idea that we could fish or find oil in the Arctic, that all this is within reach now. Those with high needs want to be. And it would seem that the only tool available to all these governments is to send the army on the spot. You have to wonder: what is the police doing in the Arctic?
The metaphor, the deep layer that I try to incorporate into my work, is that nature is absolute power. When we abuse it, nature can answer beyond any weapon or technology available to save us. But I want to stay positive: I would like to see the armies do security to avoid pollution, protect the species - I think it's the future. This philosophy is what will save us on this planet. And avoid beating each other.
You say that everything has brought you into your life to do this work. The conditions are extreme. Did you anticipate everything as a man and as a photographer ?
Many people can prepare for the Arctic. But in the end, the Arctic defeats everything that is invented. Men sometimes have the ego to think they have the ultimate power. In the Arctic, you see all these new human inventions and all those things that are supposed to take over nature. But the Arctic is not a place to be controlled. The camera, some days, it freezes, it does not work. Some days I freeze, and it does not work.
You accompany soldiers to the Far North, a region so inhospitable that simply breathing at -60 ° C can cost you your life ...
The difference between this kind of military training and any other is that you can die every day by training. This is the only place in the world where the air temperature will kill you. If you are injured, you can die simply because you are unable to drive to the hospital within a week, because the weather is too bad.
The other challenge is the psychological part. There is at least two months of almost total darkness. After two weeks, you begin to feel really depressed. If I had to send an army there, that's the first thing I would worry about. I had to take tests. You have to be able to train. It's the most hostile environment, unless you're in a volcano or something like that.
You lose your gloves, you can die. Your hands will freeze, it can be enough to have very serious problems. You put on your mask badly, you get a black scar on your face forever. If you get sick, because you have eaten something for example, or drank too much coffee, you have diarrhea, and you catch cold - danger.
If you do not change socks every day, it's your feet that get cold. And when that happens up there, you feel the fear. The only time I saw soldiers feeling so scared was in Afghanistan when they were walking in a minefield. Because they know, when they go in there, that the situation is no longer under control. You can not see the threat, it can come up at any moment and kill you.
We can end up in a snowstorm. Your snowmobile lets go, no one realizes it and they move forward. You are lost in the middle of nowhere, there is no road, you can not turn on your phone, there is no line. Your GPS does not work.
Do you think of Han Solo up there, sometimes?
I love the question! The Empire counter-attacks , planet Hoth at the beginning of the film. There were days there, I stopped at a base by -60 ° C, and I said to myself, " This scene is simply unreal. It's so real that it becomes unreal. Darth Vader will land, we will climb on the Death Star. There are places I was not allowed to shoot because they are top-secret radar bases. Like "US Space Command", as in Greenland.
All these scenes that we see in science fiction come from things that exist. The Arctic I can tell you about has clearly inspired certain scenes. Han Solo? Rather Luke Skywalker and this huge creature that attacks it. Whenever you have to go to the bathroom at night, you are alone, you take a look out of the tent, and you hope there are no polar bears waiting for you!
Did you see some?
Several, yes! One meter from me, on the water generally. They try to attack the boat, so we tack. They are beautiful to watch, but that's the situation guys: a polar bear is a killing machine. He can survive the most extreme environment on Earth, he can swim. He hunts all he wants in the Arctic. He is only killing, with maximum violence, and eating. In a sense, it symbolizes the omnipotence of the Arctic.
On the Visa website for image: Louie Palu - Exhibitions 2019