the last time I went there I was really focused on making pictures that could portray

you know women in the polar landscape and how it's it's not a man's world by any means.

The Arctic is a place where families have lived for over 10,000 years.

And yeah, we need to be seeing the full picture.

That was photographer Acacia Johnson.

Most of Acacia's work has been focused on human relationships to the environment.

She spent most of her 20s traveling around Scandinavia and the polar regions working on ships.

Today she has over 50 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica.

In part one of our conversation, she talks about subverting the stereotypes of what it means to be

an explorer.

And that means reframing the image of a man conquering landscapes to an image of a symbiotic relationship between people and the landscapes they live on.

So here's the first part of my conversation with Acacia Johnson.

Welcome to Chattermarks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum dedicated to exploring Alaska's

identity through the creative and critical

thinking of ideas, past, present, and future. My name is Cody Liska and I'll be

your host. You know you've traveled to lots of arctic places, lots of Arctic places, lots of cold places. Do you ever wish you were from

somewhere else, maybe somewhere warmer? Oh, definitely not. I think Alaska is the best place in the world to be from. I love it and I love cold places.

There's some kind of magic in the far north that I really haven't sensed anywhere else.

In what way?

You know, maybe my artistic practice is trying to pin that down.

I'm not sure.

I think there's something about the changes of seasons.

...