Photographer Alexander Zelinskiy is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘70th Parallel’. To see Alexander’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Ice Life. Scorsby Sound, Eastern Greenland

Creeper. Scorsby Sound, Eastern Greenland

There are places on our planet where humans cannot survive without exerting all their strength. Due to this, some regions have remained untouched or almost untouched. It’s not because humanity has tried to preserve them. On the contrary, although humans are a product of nature and part of it, they still try to change it and sometimes even destroy it, replacing it with an artificial environment like megalopolises. In uninhabited areas with no cities or other traces of civilization, where nature has retained its pristine face, only there can we fully hear its voice. ‘Beauty will save the world,’ Russian writer Dostoevsky once remarked. The beauty of these landscapes can tell us, the children of nature, the children of our planet, something vitally important. Moreover, it can be a healing for the mental health and balance of modern man damaged by the ever-accelerating pace of life and our increasing dependence on technology. Sometimes we need to stop and look around. We just need to learn how to listen, to listen with our eyes where the signs that we perceive as the grandeur of nature speak directly to our subconscious. They restore our sense of unity with the surrounding world in which our ancestors lived for thousands and tens of thousands of years.

The 70th parallel is a territory beyond the Arctic Circle, where the seas and lands have not yet been fully explored by civilization. In many ways, they have remained as they were thousands and tens of thousands of years ago. This journey is not only through space, but also through time. The photographs were taken off the coasts of Iceland, Greenland and Spitsbergen.

Colors of the Northern Seas. Scorsby Sound, Eastern Greenland

Obelisk. Scorsby Sound, Eastern Greenland

Alexander Zelinskiy is an amateur photographer born and living in Moscow, Russia. He has been interested in landscape photography for a long time, but only in recent years he gained free time and opportunity to travel extensively to see the most beautiful places of our planet: Iceland coasts, Greenland fiords, national parks of Canada, USA and South America, nature reserves of Namibia and South Africa. Most of them have been the subject of many other photographs, but that doesn't bother Alexander. He believes that the landscape is inexhaustible, boundless, it can give everyone their own picture of our world. Everything depends on us. Alexander prefers the classical approach to the landscape, which mainly suggests an abundance of details, multiple plans and album composition, because this form is the best to convey the feeling and atmosphere of the place. He regards post-processing of the image as an integral and very important part of the creative process, where accents of light, color and texture are placed. Perceiving the landscape as a theater of nature, he believes that it needs an element of drama while preserving naturalness. So that processing should not turn into a kind of sport where one collage competes with another. He uses both a conventional digital camera and a drone.

All images and text © Alexander Zelinskiy