Expedition To Greenland

A rare photographic opportunity is getting even rarer. If you’re interested in joining Frans Lanting and Justin Black for a Visionary Wild Greenland photo expedition, this September may be your best and final opportunity. Rembrandt van Rijn, the three-masted schooner they’ve chartered, will no longer be available. This September offers photographers one last chance to experience a particularly special way to experience the western coast of Greenland.

“We created what I think is the best photographic trip to Greenland that you can book on,” Lanting says. “And we’re going to repeat that this year in September. We’re going to travel with the same schooner and then we’re adding even more exclusive opportunities. In addition to the schooner, we charter local fishing boats so that we can get even closer to icebergs. So when you come with us you’re surrounded by ice. And then, to make it even better, we also charter helicopters so that we can lift everybody above the scenery so they can get the big picture. It’s very difficult to find ships and to support an experience logistically, and we found the formula. It’s pretty special overall.”

“There are so many workshops and photo trips out there,” Black says, “it would be real easy just to do things other people have already done. But what we try to do is find the exceptional, or put a spin on things that makes it a really unique experience. One of the really important features of this trip is that we’re basically the masters of the boat. We can say to the captain, ‘The conditions over here aren’t what we were thinking, let’s go over there instead.’”

“The reason why I do these trips and offer them to other people,” Lanting says, “is that I really enjoy teaching photography, I really enjoy sharing experiences, and most of all the very process of being together with a like-minded group of people leads to a process of creating images in a collaborative sense that is quite special. Because we have a floating platform with all the facilities we need to be able to download images, edit images, share images, it’s a conversation that never stops.

This ship will be taken out of the Greenland mix by the company that it sails for, and the voyage that we’ve booked for 2016 will probably be the last opportunity for us to work with that ship, and we’ve not found a successor yet. So if anyone is intrigued by what they read and what they see, they should think seriously about joining us in September because we may not be able to repeat this.”

For more information about this year’s upcoming Greenland expedition, visit https://visionarywild.com/workshops/greenland2016

William Sawalich

William Sawalich made his first darkroom print at age 10. He earned a bachelor’s degree in photography from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, then a master’s degree from The Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. He is a working commercial photographer specializing in editorial, advertising and corporate assignments, and an adjunct photography faculty member at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He has been writing about photography for an audience of advanced amateurs and professionals since 1998.

Frans Lanting

Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. For more than two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. He portrays wild creatures as ambassadors for the preservation of complete ecosystems, and his many publications have increased worldwide awareness of endangered ecological treasures in the far corners of the Earth.