Soon enough the trip felt like being a trainspotter's endeavor: Just five minutes after getting away from the residence house I stopped again, pulled the camera and tripod out of the car to film a long line of iron ore carriages, whose load emitted steamy clouds into the morning sky. The sun had not risen yet, but the light, as all North nerds know, is the most fantastic during dawn and dusk. So I started a short but intense trip with cold feet.
Short the trip would be since dusk arrives at 1 p.m. and it is light till maybe 2 p.m. By that time I wanted to be in Narvik already, following the railway line that connects Kiruna with Narvik. Initially I wanted to be on the train – imagining it might rise even higher through the last part towards Narvik than the much newer street that follows the tracks otherwise. But then I realized that taking pictures out of the wagons would just not capture the train itself. One would anyway be on the passenger train, one of two day-to-day, that they want to get rid of as soon as possible to put even more ore trains on the schedule.
The train it is that makes Kiruna possible – maybe even more than the mine (according to Lennart Lantto, who was again of great help). To begin with the invention of the train in England and the giant task, undertaken by British workers, of laying tracks for a railway through the mountains from Narvik to Kiruna, the iron ore could finally reach the world market: Narvik is the closest ice-free harbor. The Gulf Stream keeps the waters from freezing, meanwhile the sea is closing on the Swedish side, in Luleå.
If this sounds like an advertisement story for the exploitation of Northern Europe, I cannot really help it. I feel like caught into the fascination of these ventures: the work, through summer and winter, laying out tracks; just as the mine, the omnipresent humming and the metal bangs, the lights in the winter darkness, the steams, the giant destruction of land caused by the breaking down of the earth into the mine closing the tunnels, when they are empty and left by the machines. And the history with its dark parts: The ore was shipped to England
and Germany, firing WW II, until the Germans conquered Norway. From there on tons of ore were shipped to German steel mills and, I imagine, used in the process to built giant battleships like the Tirpitz, which than steamed towards North again to take part in the “defense” of the long Norwegian coast and especially Narvik. Only to be brought down in no time by English ships and planes: The one and only trip of the Bismarck took eight days and cost 3.500 sailors lives. That way the ore returned to the North and formed a giant coffin for thousands of soldiers on the bottom of the sea.
(It might be added that new lightweight technologies helped here: Computer pioneer Alan Turing and his knowledge supported the UK in deciphering the German navy codes. He did that on his own, personal prison, but that is another story…)
Narvik is dark in winter and this time a rainstorm added to the darkness the following day. Filming impossible! Fortunately I had taken images in the night: the trains passing each other in incredible slow moves. And Dave wants to lend me some shots from the Malmkaien, the quay where the ore gets loaded. On the way back the rain turned into snow - finally there was the snow that I had come for, much too late this winter! I was happy that spikes on winter tires are allowed in Sweden. Still, trucks were stopped by ice on uphill parts of the street and had to be equipped with winter chains. I took more images of the train and the incredible landscape. It felt a bit like Borg Mesch on the Kebnekaise, 100 years earlier.
Just the day before we had visited the now-closed photo archive of Kiruna commune. There, all those glas-negatives are kept that Borg Mesch exposed when living in Kiruna, next to thousands of other images and films. Mesch is the great documentarian of the raise of city and mine, and he was there when the Malmbanan was built. Some of his most popular images picture railway engines falling from the track; popular for the trainspotter, that is. More important, he pictured the people living in Kiruna: the workers, their kids, the poor housing. He photographed the mine director and his family, the festivities, the cultural events, all the city life. And he shot the landscape, in summer and winter times, with and without snow.
I imagine that with the arrival of the photographer Mesch in 1899, the image history of Kiruna got started. I have always been interested in the way how images not only document, but also form history. With Borg Mesch we have a single person that stands for this process – and possibly the figure of the artist within it, his position between adventurer, and owner of a small business: Just taking the image where he places himself in front of his studios: first a small, then a bigger one, built into his house. In the end he lived in a fine, bourgeois villa close to a central small plaza, which now carries his name: Borg, the castle, Borg, the borgerlig, the bourgeois. And the other side, when he pictures himself on his travels. The archive contains also the backpack made out of light weight birch bark he had invented for himself: Borg, the adventurer.
Until I changed my mind, I thought that by taking the train and especially by being in the train, I would be close to the railway and thereby close to where Borg Mesch shot the images of its construction. I would like to return, for one in summer, to make the trip by foot and with some lightweight camera equipment, but also to see the landscape without the snow like Mesch did. And I thought of inventing a story that takes place within the train and outside of the train. With the images shot in the snow and with the archive – and thus history – backing, it might as well develop into a story of a ghost train, haunted by the past, that runs between the iron ore trains and the few passenger carriers.
