This photograph forms part of a wider series of 14 grouped under the title 'Deep Time Vanishing', by London-based, South African artist Tamsin Relly. In autumn 2014, Relly participated in The Arctic Circle, an expeditionary residency on board a tall ship in Svalbard, Norway. She wanted to experience these rapidly changing Polar regions first hand, as research for her interest in exploration, climate change and exploitation of land and natural resources.
The photographs were shot during the expedition using a medium format analogue camera, and were later hand printed directly from the negative. In printmaking, painting, and photography, she says, Relly works with ‘what is fluid and unpredictable about these materials and processes to present impressions of urban and natural environments in states of uncertainty or impermanence. Here the multiple exposures created in the field on camera, and accidents typical of the analogue process, invite unpredictable outcomes in the negatives. These layered, broken underexposed impressions disrupt the translation of the landscape image. They also contribute to the sense of motion experienced on board a moving ship and hint at the vulnerability and impermanence of the environment’.
The images across the series reflect both the idea of the untouched landscape of our imaginations as well as the reality of humanity's interventions. 'Was (Pyramiden)' shows some of the remaining structures of a disused and largely abandoned Russian coal-mining town.