A bench in a park by the Oder river on a sunny afternoon. A lovely backdrop for my conversation with Ilona Wiśniewska about surviving the winter longing for the sun. I want to learn all the tricks this reporter and photographer is hiding up her sleeve. After all, she wrote so beautifully about her experiences with polar nights in her debut book, Białe [White]. Jan Pelczar: What can one do to prepare for the lack of sun?

Ilona Wiśniewska: In Spitsbergen, there is no sun for four months a year, so the most important thing is to enter the darkness gradually. Attitude is equally important. The point is not to view darkness as something unambiguously negative. Once you live there, you realize there is actually a lot of light to be found in a sunless landscape.

And where does it come from?

It comes primarily from the snow that reflects the moonlight, the northern lights, the shades of indigo in the sky, the stars. When it’s really freezing, the sky turns red. In the north, the moon hangs lower in the sky, and it’s visibly larger, casting sharp dark shadows on the ground.

Does one perceive the moon differently in those sunless months?

In the north, especially in the places far from the city, the moon becomes the only source of natural light during the polar night. I could spend hours on end watching it travel across the sky. It’s hypnotizing. I think that almost everyone in the far north has a very special relationship with the moon. I talk to it sometimes. In Poland, the moon is disappearing, blotted out by other sources of light. It becomes really obvious during air travel.