Before Greenland became a headline, my grandfather photographed home
Today, Greenland is receiving unprecedented international attention. Political leaders discuss our strategic location, critical minerals, military significance and place in a changing Arctic. Maps are displayed, interests declared and possible futures debated often by people far away from Greenland itself.
Against this backdrop, an exhibition of photographs taken by my grandfather offers another way of looking at Greenland. The exhibition DAAMANI consists of photographs taken in and around Tasiilaq (formerly known as Ammassalik/Angmagsalik) in East Greenland during the 1950s and 1960s. My grandfather, Arkaluk, did not photograph the region as a visiting explorer or an outsider documenting something exotic. He photographed the place where he lived and the people and the place that surrounded him.
His images show everyday life: families, children, hunters, celebrations, work, landscapes and encounters between people. They show expressions, relationships and moments that would otherwise have disappeared. The people in the photographs are not symbols of the Arctic. They are individuals who lived their lives.
That distinction matters – perhaps more now than ever.
My grandfather died in 1987. When my father, James William Josef Bianco, went to Tasiilaq to close his estate, he found around 2,000 photographic negatives. He knew they were important, even if no one yet knew exactly what would become of them.
For nearly three decades, he kept them safe. Around 2014 Helene Brochmann — a close friend of our family and later my co-curator — became aware of the collection. Together, Helene, my father and my aunt, Katrine Bianco Svanholm, began examining the negatives and Helene’s work would eventually turn into the book Dagligliv i Ammassalik (Everyday Life in Ammassalik) published in 2024.
I joined the work later, and saw that the photographs connected three generations: my grandfather, who had created the images; my father, who had protected them; and me, his granddaughter, helping to return them to the place and the people from which they came.
In that sense, DAAMANI is not only an exhibition. It is a family story about memory, responsibility and homecoming. The title DAAMANI means “(back) then” and is a simple term carrying a powerful insistence on time and place. These lives happened. These people belonged. Their stories are rooted.
When the photographs were taken, they captured ordinary moments in the present. Today, they have become historical testimony. Yet the people pictured should not be reduced to figures from a distant past. Their descendants may still recognize a relative, a gesture, an article of clothing or a familiar landscape. That’s why it’s been pivotal for the book and the exhibition to have people named to the largest extent possible.
The exhibition is not only at the art hall Nordatlantisk Brygge in Copenhagen (until January 2027) but also opened in Tasiilaq, Greenland, on August 20, 2026. The people of Tasiilaq looked closely, shared names, memories and connections. The exhibition became a living meeting place between images and community memory.
This is also why returning the photographs to Tasiilaq was so important. Historical images of Indigenous communities have too often been removed from their places of origin, classified by outsiders and preserved in institutions inaccessible to the people depicted. DAAMANI follows another movement: back toward the community. The exhibition has been donated to Tasiilaq Museum so it can remain connected to local knowledge and future generations.
This process has raised questions about who gets to interpret Greenland. International interest in Greenland is not necessarily negative. Greenland should be heard and engaged with as an active international partner. But attention becomes dangerous when a country is seen primarily as territory, a security asset or a source of raw materials. In that gaze, people can disappear.
My grandfather’s photographs resist that disappearance.
They peel away the geopolitical map and reveal a lived Greenland: specific, intimate, humorous and human. They remind us that Greenland did not suddenly come into existence when powerful countries began paying attention to it. Communities such as Tasiilaq have their own histories and memories. Their histories existed long before today’s headlines and will remain after political attention moves elsewhere.
For me, curating DAAMANI with Helene Brochmann has also been a way of getting closer to a grandfather I never had the opportunity to know as an adult. Through his camera, I can see something of what caught his attention: the dignity of a person, the energy of a gathering, the drama of the landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life.
Perhaps people are finally listening to Greenland. If so, we must consider what they are listening for.
Are they listening only to statements about defence, investment and independence? Or are they willing to listen to the quieter stories carried by families, communities and old negatives kept safe in a box for almost 30 years?
Behind every strategic map is a homeland. Behind every political debate are people whose lives cannot be reduced to someone else’s interests. My grandfather’s photographs do not explain all of Greenland. They do something more valuable: They allow people from a particular place and time to be seen.
Nauja Bianco is a Greenlandic-Danish consultant, writer and curator specializing in Arctic and Nordic affairs, culture and identity. She is the granddaughter of East Greenlandic Inuk and photographer Arkaluk Bianco and co-curator, with Helene Brochmann, of DAAMANI, an exhibition featuring his photographs of everyday life in Tasiilaq and the surrounding settlements during the 1950s and 1960s taken by Arkaluk Bianco.
