Artist's Statement

Jonathan Philippe LEVY (1983) is a Brussels based french photographer.

His work builds itself up around two major stakes in photography, portraits and landscape.
The work presented here is the in Svalbard project, realized in 2008 in Spitzbergen, an arctic archipelago located on ice-barrier southernmost point.

October 2008, 78°13'N, 15°38'E, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, one of the last intact place on earth, the light disappears.

21 days during which the sun lowers its course until it raises no more.

The work builds itself up around the polar landscape as seen during those colorful days.

Going from a deep orange to a deep blue, through a range of yellow, pink and even green colors, the object is here subjected to an untameable light.

As a writer following his pen, here was a time to follow the light, using the landscape as an intermediary.

A failing light for a failing landscape, a place on earth where global warming is showing us his strongest impact, visions of a double
agony.

Those images talk about Thomas Mann’s magical mountain, they talk about japanese stamps, chinese engravings.

But there is something else.

There definitely are other stakes about this work.


This switch from what reality is to an beyond is something only a Man can build.
There’s nothing more than a particular reality at first glance/sight.
There’s nothing more real than the world that surrounds us because it’s deferent from what is known.

Far from any ecological statement, this double agony reminds us of a known future.

First, icecap will slowly met, so as to tease us about our mistakes, then fossil energies will become profitable.

As an Alaska full of oil wells, we’ll find there more and more coal mines, exploited by different countries (each country who signed
Svalbard Treaty is allowed to exploit natural resources at no conditions).

Then landscape will die by Man, so as the image to become trace, should it be mine is not important.