A desperate attempt to regain strength, to trust myself again, to find my balance in a world where everything trembles and nothing stays still.
Not the ice beneath me, not the ship carrying me, not even my own hands trying to capture what is in front of me.
There is something strange about losing confidence in something you have done almost instinctively for so many years. My hand no longer works the way it once did. It is weaker, less reliable, and sometimes struggles to follow what my mind asks of it. But it still works. Perhaps not perfectly, perhaps not as effortlessly, but it works.
And yet, somewhere between what my hand can no longer do and what I fear it cannot do, I seem to have forgotten how to photograph.
It is extraordinary how much of our ability lives in our minds. How quickly doubt can convince us that we have lost something that is still very much there. Years of experience, thousands of photographs, countless hours learning to anticipate a movement, recognize a moment, trust an instinct. None of that has disappeared. And yet, a small loss of physical control has somehow managed to shake the confidence built over a lifetime.
I find myself thinking too much about things I once did without thinking at all. Questioning decisions that used to come naturally. Hesitating where I once trusted myself.
Perhaps the most difficult part of losing strength is not the physical limitation itself, but the fear that slowly grows around it.
And there I was, at the edge of September, somewhere in the pack ice of Svalbard, trying to photograph a polar bear from a moving ship. The sea was moving, the ice was drifting, the bear was walking, and my hands were trembling.
Nothing was still long enough for me to feel in control.
But perhaps control was never what made me a photographer.
Perhaps it was always the willingness to remain present in uncertainty, to keep looking, to keep trying, even when the conditions were far from perfect.
The bear continued walking across the shifting ice, entirely occupied with the business of being alive. It did not wait for the world to become steady beneath its feet.
And I wondered how often we allow our minds to take away what our bodies are still capable of giving.
Maybe confidence does not return all at once. Maybe it comes back quietly, through the simple act of doing something again, imperfectly, until we begin to recognize ourselves.
Perhaps we are all learning to hold steady in a world that never stops moving.
From Home, October 2026
