Reuben travelled to the Svalbard Archipelago (600 miles south of the North Pole) in 2011 and spent ten days exploring the winter landscapes. These images depict the things that interested him while he was there:
Aerial Transport Station: Coal mining was Spitsbergen’s main industry, and the coal was transported around the island using cable cars. This is an aerial transport station, which stands disused above the town of Longyearbyen.

Sousy Svalbard Radar: The remote location of Svalbard means that there is very little radio interference in the atmosphere, allowing for many weather and aurora monitoring operations to function efficiently. This particular image depicts the Sousy Svalbard Radar, a mesosphere-stratosphere-troposphere radar located in Adventdalen.

Fire Emergency Simulator: Longyearbyen Airport is the northernmost airport in the world. This object is a mock-up airplane designed to train fire fighters in the event of an accident. But it seems to represent more than that. It speaks to the notion of how objects seem talismanic, symbolising our relationship with technology and the forces of nature.

Reuben Wu’s photographs steadfastly sit somewhere between 1970s’ concept album art, expeditionary imagery and surrealist painting. His pictures are made in the real world; however, through collapsing time and merging processes, the real is transformed into the surreal, evoking a response simultaneously familiar and foreign. The photographs amplify the strangeness of place and speak to Reuben’s individual experience within it.

The remnants of his processes – chemicals dragged arduously across the sensitised paper surface, infrared film shifting the world’s natural hues, light leaking into the camera and hitting the film plane – leave traces of their varied journeys embedded in the final image.
Reuben’s physical journey is a similar one – he treks with cameras in tow to places that, for most of us, are places only ‘explorers’ would go. Considering the lengths Reuben travels to make his photographs, the unpredictability of his materials is not exactly what we’d deem trustworthy. The resultant images delineate from the expected photographic trajectory and provide a mode of seeing that is equally experiential and aesthetically unique.