The Light7 Dec – 6 Jan

Polar Night

A month with no sunrise

For a month either side of the solstice, the sun does not clear the horizon at all this far north. In Abisko that runs from around the seventh of December to the sixth of January.

It is not dark. That is the thing nobody believes until they stand in it. The sun sits just below the edge of the world and throws light up into the sky for hours, and because it never climbs, that light never turns white — it stays in the blues and the violets and the low pinks, all day, with a long orange band along the south.

Swedes have a word for the specific blue of it. The hour that photographers elsewhere chase and lose in ten minutes lasts most of the working day here, and it lands on snow, which throws it back up at you.

What you actually do in it

What you actually do in it is quieter than a list. You walk, you look, you are back indoors before you expected. Four hours outdoors in this light is a long day, and nobody manages more.

It suits some people enormously and a few not at all, and we would rather say so now. If you are someone who flags without daylight, this is the wrong month and February is the right one — same landscape, same snow, six hours of sun.

For everyone else it is the strangest light in Europe and it is free, and the aurora season sits directly on top of it. There is no competing daylight to wash the sky out, which is why the darkest weeks are also the best ones.

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