Much of the West pictures Greenland as a desolate field of ice; in To Skip a Sinking Stone, Daniel Dorsa photographs an island teeming with the life its ice sheet sustains.
It started with someone else’s Instagram. In 2022 Dorsa’s high-school friend Chelsey Bomar was posting from Greenland, where she was working toward a PhD in microbiology with a research group on the melting ice sheet. The group’s initials, from Significance of Ice-Loss to Landscapes in the Arctic, spell Sila, an Inuit concept that covers the physical world and, in the same word, a spiritual sense of how to live within it; its scientists study what the melt changes downstream. Dorsa pitched a story about them, nobody picked it up, and he went anyway. The first trip, in 2023, lasted seven weeks.
He came home to Los Angeles unsure of what he had. For about six months he did morning pages, and they kept circling back to the ice sheet, which he began to treat as a living organism: it shifts weather patterns, erodes the landscape around it and, as it melts, reaches the rest of the world. Eventually he came to regard it as a demi-god. “It’s an entity to be respected,” he says. Across four trips between 2023 and 2025, the science gave ground and the work filled up with people.
Those people carry the book as much as the ice does. Dorsa photographs the football pitch at Qeqertarsuaq on Disko Island, a chef named Aggu in Nuuk and, in Sisimiut, a young woman named Nava in her traditional furs, the portrait he counts as his favourite in the book. He is drawn to how people move between traditional ways of living and modern life, with the ice never far off. Even unseen, he writes, it makes clear that “adaptation is not a choice, but a condition of living here.”
The book keeps its contradictions together on purpose. Midway through the work, one arrived uninvited: the United States president threatened to seize Greenland, and strangers who heard Dorsa’s American accent began to question his intentions. He calls the result an atlas, in the original sense Gerardus Mercator gave the word: less a set of maps than an attempt to understand the universe and where people stand within it.
Published by Deadbeat Club of Los Angeles in 2026, the book is Dorsa’s fourth and his first with the press. It runs to 144 pages at 10 by 12.25 inches in five-colour offset, and the black-and-white frames, printed in duotone and empty of people, act as breaks in the sequence. The Swiss-bound softcover carries a half-toned silkscreen, and a vellum wrap holds his journal writings, so the text sits on the outside of the book.
The title is borrowed, with permission, from Skip a Sinking Stone, an album by Jordan Lee, who records as Mutual Benefit. It fits: a flat stone stays up only while it keeps moving. For Dorsa it speaks to climate change, a problem too big for any one person to solve without collective action, and to the joy people find regardless in a place with no choice but to adapt. Sooner or later, he writes, everyone will meet that condition. Greenland simply meets it first.
