Introduction: Visualising the Arctic

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses Arctic visuality in relation to other forms of communication such as audio and tactile communication. It discusses the imaginative investment in the North by the global community. The book focuses on aesthetic, ideological, political and social transformations in and about the Arctic from the perspective of the visual. It makes use of the notion of representation to consider how the Arctic is represented in different media, genres and forms. The book analyses some principal visual tropes associated with the Arctic and the North. It aims to conceptualise the Arctic in terms of visuality, gender and space. The book discusses contemporary ethnographic film featuring an indigenous family living in the North and challenging earlier Soviet educational films which contributed to shaping the spatial imagination of the North.