Multimedia: The Whale Hunt

"In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. The first several days were spent in the village of Barrow, exploring ramshackle structures, buying gear, and otherwise helping the whaling crew to prepare for the hunt. We then traveled by snowmobile out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean, where we camped three miles from shore on thick pack ice, pitching our tents about ten feet from the open water. Boats were readied, harpoons prepared, whaling guns loaded, white tunics donned, a snow fence constructed, and then we sat silently in the -22 °F air, in constant daylight, waiting for whales to appear."

This is how Jonathan Harris starts his statement on
The Whale Hunt, a multimedia storytelling experiment. He documents the adventure by taking photos every five minutes and in times of high adrenaline, increasing the pace to match his heartbeat. Starting at the Newark airport and ending with the butchering of the second whale, Harris took a total of 3,124 photographs over the course of nine days."