In recent years the Arctic region has drawn international attention. Increasing climate change combined with possible finding of natural resources have transformed the region into an arena for high politics. But while stories about oil fields, rising sea levels and mines have been plentiful, there has been almost no attention towards the regions most important resource; the Inuits. In the hope of
conveying a more varied image of the people inhabiting Greenland, photographers Lasse Bak Mejlvang and Dennis Lehmann initiated the long-term project Inuit Now. In 2014 they each spent one month in respectively Sisimiut and Tasiusaq on the West Coast of Greenland. Sisimiut is today's fastest growing city in Greenland with almost 6.000 inhabitants. Here, young people flock to attend higher level education that can not be found in the outskirts, thereby creating a buzzing, metropolitan atmosphere like that of any European city. In Tasiusaq on the other hand there are almost no young people left. Instead their parents, grand-parents and younger siblings make out the small settlement of 248 people living in a harsh archipelago the size of Great Britain. Here, most people are either fishermen or hunters living an isolated life in close contact with nature. Together, the highly individual works of the two photographers combine to create not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait of a people that is everything but the simple and often polarised representation in national and international news media. The humble life of the fishermen in the North is juxtaposed and mixed with the flourishing pulse of the youth in Sisimiut, thereby creating a heterogenous narrative of a paradoxical place that can be difficult to understand by outsiders.
