Against the Sublime: Inuuteq Storch and the Civic Reality of the Arctic

Note: This is the latest in a series of essays we’re sharing by Samuel Abrams focusing on contributors to civic aesthetics -- creators who show how the arts and the built environment can enrich civic life.

The Arctic has long been flattened by two dominant habits of seeing. It appears either as spectacle - an endless white sublime emptied of social life - or as warning sign, reduced to a moral tableau of planetary crisis. In both frames, geography as lived reality disappears. Settlement, interiors, work, infrastructure, and routine are pushed aside in favor of symbolism. What is gained is moral urgency; what is lost is understanding and with it, the ability to judge places as they actually are.

The photography of Inuuteq Storch quietly but decisively resists that tradeoff. His work does not scold or sermonize. It does not demand outrage or awe. Instead, it attends - carefully, concretely, and without ideological theatrics. Across landscapes, interiors, and scenes of labor, Storch insists that Greenland is not an abstraction but a civic and domestic world, shaped by policy decisions, inherited practices, environmental limits, and daily competence.

That sensibility is on full display in Soon Will Summer Be Over, Storch’s first U.S. solo exhibition, now on view at MoMA PS1. The exhibition traces roughly a decade of work across Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but it returns again and again to Storch’s hometown of Sisimiut, a community of about 5,500 people just north of the Arctic Circle. That scale matters. This is not the Arctic as frontier or metaphor, but as town: a place with routines, constraints, institutions, and memory.

Seen together, the photographs in the exhibition clarify what this kind of attention accomplishes and why it carries larger civic and cultural implications.

Settlement Without Spectacle

One wide photograph looks down on a Greenlandic settlement stretched laterally across the frame, positioned between exposed brown tundra and a frozen bay. Low clouds compress the horizon, flattening any sense of grandeur. At first glance, the image resembles the Arctic panoramas museums often favor. But the center of gravity is elsewhere. The eye is drawn not to ice or sky, but to the band of houses; modest, evenly spaced, oriented toward use rather than display.

Nothing here is heroic or fragile. The town is not dwarfed by nature, nor does it dominate it. Instead, the photograph records accommodation: how people place themselves where permanence is provisional and seasons impose real limits. Roads curve with the terrain; spacing reflects judgment rather than ambition. This is geography as settlement - ordinary, durable, and lived - rather than landscape as myth.

Across the exhibition, images like this recur, quietly insisting that Greenland is not empty land awaiting meaning from outside forces. It is already organized through human decision-making, sustained through routine, and governed - sometimes well, sometimes imperfectly - through institutions that leave visible marks on the land. In a cultural moment inclined toward abstraction, Storch keeps returning us to placement, proportion, and use.

Interior Life as Cultural Ground

One of the most consequential images in Soon Will Summer Be Over is an interior. A large cut of fish occupies the foreground, heavy and unmistakably material. Behind it sit two elderly women, composed and unperformative. They do not smile. They do not pose. They do not explain themselves.

The room carries the deeper story. Religious imagery hangs on the wall. Utilitarian shelving holds everyday objects. A Greenlandic flag rests in the corner without ceremony. Light fixtures hang plainly, slightly off-kilter. Nothing here is decorative. Everything is functional, inherited, or habitual.

The photograph collapses familiar binaries - traditional and modern, sacred and secular, domestic and political - and replaces them with continuity under constraint. Culture appears not as performance or heritage display, but as practice, carried forward inside modest modern space. The setting is contemporary housing; the activity is ancestral. They coexist without friction and without commentary.

This emphasis on interiors runs throughout the exhibition. Kitchens, hallways, and shared spaces become sites where Inuit tradition, Danish colonial legacies, and global modernity are not debated but lived. Storch documents these spaces without nostalgia and without accusation. What emerges is a truth rarely acknowledged in contemporary cultural discourse: communities endure not through visibility or symbolic recognition, but through repetition; skills practiced, food prepared, rooms used as intended.

Work, Animals, and Proper Scale

Another photograph places people and dogs together at the edge of broken ice. The dogs are not romantic symbols; they are working animals - alert, restless, integral. Humans move among them without ceremony. No one poses. The ice is fractured and transitional, signaling not timeless winter but seasonal uncertainty.

What stands out is scale. Human figures are neither heroic nor diminished. They are proportioned correctly; to dogs, to tools, to ice floes, to shoreline. The image records competence rather than endurance mythology. It refuses nostalgia and refuses crisis. Work continues because it must, and because people know how to do it.

Across the exhibition, scenes like this recur. They show labor not as spectacle or suffering, but as practiced judgment. Limits are real - environmental, seasonal, economic - but they do not erase agency. In a cultural climate that increasingly frames people primarily as victims of systems, Storch’s photographs insist on something sturdier: the dignity of competence, responsibility assumed rather than performed.

Weather as Friction

In a snowstorm photograph, flakes fill the frame, breaking the image into a field of light and shadow that nearly dissolves depth. The effect approaches abstraction. And yet, at the center stands infrastructure: a steel structure, a utility bin, snow piled thickly against both.

There is no metaphor here. Snow is not purity or erasure; it is interference, delay, accumulation. It presses on systems designed to endure it and shapes how space is navigated and time is experienced. Rather than dramatizing isolation or climate anxiety, the photograph records what weather actually does: it interrupts.

This attention to infrastructure - housing blocks, walkways, utilities, industrial remnants - runs throughout Soon Will Summer Be Over. Buildings appear not as backdrops, but as records of governance and policy. Weather does not symbolize crisis; it tests systems. Climate is encountered not as abstraction, but as maintenance deferred, repairs required, movement slowed.

The civic implication is clear. Environmental limits enter human life not as slogans or spectacles, but as friction with the built world. Storch photographs that friction without editorializing it.

What the Camera Refuses

What distinguishes Storch’s work is not simply what it shows, but what it refuses. Much contemporary photography is asked to do moral work on behalf of institutions - to dramatize crisis, simplify causality, and convert places into arguments. In that visual economy, accuracy is often treated as neutrality, and restraint as evasion. Storch rejects that logic. His photographs insist that seeing clearly is not a moral failure. It is the condition for moral seriousness.

This discipline of seeing is increasingly rare and its absence has consequences. When places are reduced to symbols, judgment collapses. When people are framed primarily as embodiments of crisis, competence disappears from view. Storch’s work quietly but firmly pushes back against that cultural drift.

Where This Work Belongs in Photography

Seen clearly, Soon Will Summer Be Over is not best understood as Arctic photography, Indigenous photography, or climate photography; at least not in the reductive sense those categories often imply. Storch’s work belongs to a longer and increasingly endangered photographic tradition that treats ordinary life as morally sufficient: worthy of sustained attention without conversion into spectacle, indictment, or allegory.

The most instructive historical comparison is Walker Evans. Evans’s photographs of Depression-era America - storefronts, tenant interiors, vernacular architecture - were defined by discipline. He rejected sentimentality and reformist melodrama. His documentary style insisted that description, when precise, carries its own moral authority.

A closer contemporary parallel is Robert Adams, particularly his New Topographics work. Adams relocated moral meaning from wilderness to the built environment, photographing roads, housing tracts, and infrastructure under pressure. Storch shares this attention, but without Adams’s elegiac tone. Where Adams often documented decline, Storch documents continuity under strain.

Among living photographers, Storch’s restraint aligns with Rineke Dijkstra and Alec Soth; artists defined by patience and refusal. Dijkstra’s beach portraits hold adolescent subjects in flat, even light, withholding narrative context until awkwardness becomes dignity. Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi lingers on interiors and faces without explaining what they mean. Like them, Storch withholds emotional instruction and narrative closure. The camera waits. Meaning is allowed to emerge.

This lineage has always been vulnerable. Today it is increasingly crowded out by forms of photography that substitute affect for accuracy and declaration for description. Storch’s work stands as a corrective.

This placement clarifies not only what Storch does, but what he rejects: activist documentary that turns images into arguments; conceptual photography that abstracts place into theory; identity-forward portraiture that converts people into symbols. His photographs ask not what a place represents, but how it functions.

That is a conservative posture in the deepest sense; not ideological, but civic.

The Larger Cultural Argument

Taken together, the photographs in Soon Will Summer Be Over articulate a worldview that runs against several dominant currents in contemporary culture.

Storch replaces the Arctic sublime with proportion and placement. He replaces cultural display with routine and use. He replaces environmental allegory with work, infrastructure, and judgment. He replaces narratives of fragility with competence and continuity.

What emerges is an Arctic that is neither pristine nor collapsing, neither mythic nor moralized. It is a place where people live: deliberately, knowledgeably, and within limits that are real but not theatrical. Inuit traditions, Danish colonial influences, climate volatility, and globalization are all present in the work, but none are allowed to dominate the story. They are absorbed into daily life rather than elevated into ideology.

That is why this exhibition matters beyond Greenland or the art world. In a society increasingly governed by abstraction, where places become causes and people become symbol, Storch’s photographs defend a more demanding civic posture: the discipline of seeing ordinary life clearly. Attention, here, is not indifference. It is respect.

Soon Will Summer Be Over does not ask viewers to feel awe or alarm. It asks them to practice judgment and see towns, rooms, work, and weather without converting them into symbols. In a culture increasingly governed by performance and abstraction, that discipline is not aesthetic refinement. It is civic competence.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute. He writes frequently about civic aesthetics.