Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2017, Artico gathers Vincent Munier’s photographs from polar expeditions undertaken over six years across the Arctic. The journeys extended from Scandinavia to the northernmost islands of Nunavut, Canada, often in winter and frequently alone, with Munier travelling independently across immense distances on foot and skis while pulling heavy sleds. The book’s subject is therefore not simply Arctic wildlife, but a remote geography encountered through patience, endurance, and sustained attention.
The animals appear within this severe, open world rather than as isolated specimens: polar bears, foxes, caribou, muskoxen, Arctic hares, snowy owls, and the white wolves known in Inuit language as the “ghosts of the tundra.” One especially charged episode records a pack of nine wolves surrounding the photographer. Yet the prevailing mood is restrained. Munier’s images give the snowbound landscape a quiet, almost weightless atmosphere, allowing formal simplicity and concentrated observation to temper the physical harshness of the polar environment.
Artico also includes a booklet in which Munier sets down a travel journal and personal impressions of the Arctic, bringing the expeditionary experience into conversation with the photographs. His stated affinities with Japanese painting and minimalist art help clarify the economy of the images: the work seeks not spectacle alone, but a poetic intuition of reality. For a collector, the book’s importance lies in this union of field experience, wildlife photography, and deliberate visual reduction. It presents a sustained body of work rather than a single encounter, and makes the Arctic legible as both habitat and fragile, expansive presence.
The Italian-language edition comprises 312 pages and 202 colour illustrations, presented as two volumes in a slipcase measuring 30 × 24.5 cm. Its substantial scale gives room for the photographs’ silences and intervals, while the two-volume structure and accompanying journal distinguish it from a straightforward image anthology. Artico is best approached as a considered record of Munier’s long engagement with the far north: austere, lyrical, and grounded in the realities of travel through one of the planet’s most remote environments.
