Londoners love complaining about the weather but in Eastern Siberia it’s so cold they have an expression for the whooshing sound that moisture in exhaled breath makes as it turns into crystals in the freezing air. The native Yakut people call this phenomenon ‘the whisper of the stars’.
In 1971 British photographer Bryan Alexander used a Royal Society of Arts travel bursary to visit North West Greenland, where he lived in a small Inuit community. That experience led to a lifetime of documenting the life of the Arctic’s indigenous people and the 40 images on display at the Horniman offer an insight into how these native communities have survived.
Photographs of traditional (super snuggly-looking) dress and a lifestyle that involves heading reindeer across the tundra certainly put our gripes about chilly commutes into perspective.