Photographer Martine Lemarchand is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Permafrost’. To see Martine’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The starting point for my discovery of melting permafrost was, unfortunately, the news that a child had died of anthrax in 2016. His family, reindeer herders and members of the Nenet community had to be relocated and 2,300 reindeer died as a result of the release of this bacterium when the ground thawed.

This is because permafrost, the year-round frozen subsoil (generally located above 60°N latitude), is beginning to melt as temperatures rise.

My questions for this series concern how to render what is so far away from me.

But also, to make visible, to raise awareness of this notion of metamorphosis, of the transformation of our Earth put to the test by human pressure, by choosing a poetic and abstract approach to talk about global warming.

My proposal is a free interpretation of these landscapes. Using food ingredients (molasses, soy sauce, coffee, sparkling water, etc.) or containers (wine bags, butter paper, etc.), “territories” emerge.

Martine Lemarchand is a French self-taught photographer inspired by the abstract and drawn to “invisible elsewhere”. 

With her head in the kitchen, her main creative space, she mixes ordinary edible ingredients to photograph them. She extracts marvelous images from her mixtures, taking the eye from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. 

Several of her photos have won awards in the abstract or fine-art category: Gold medal PX3 Prix de la Photographie de Paris Gold medal at Tokyo International Foto Awards Sienna Awards in Italy Julia Margaret Cameron Women Photographer Award FAPA Fine Art Photography Awards, Chromatic photo awards.

All images and text © Martine Lemarchand