About
Kolkata to
seventy north
A farm hand, a carer, a teacher and a beach cleaner, before any of it was photography.
01 / In his own words
I ended up stuck here, about ten years now.
Photographer · Rypefjord, Norway · Published by NRK & Dagbladet
Simon Withagen was adopted from Kolkata, India, and landed in Brussels in 1996. He was one year old. Belgium raised him; at sixteen he stopped school and went north to work on a Norwegian sheep farm.
What followed was not a career plan. Two years with the sheep, a year back in Belgium, two years in Ireland caring for people with disabilities, a stretch in India doing the same work, then Norway again: five more years of lambing seasons, haymaking, timber and night shifts.
Then Hammerfest: a kindergarten, three summers pulling plastic off Arctic beaches, a year teaching first grade, a few months in a care home. And every clear night, the camera.
02 / Where it starts
A photograph
from before the memory
Simon has no memory of any of this. What he has is a handful of prints: a children's home in Kolkata, a room full of women holding babies, and two people from Belgium who came to take one of them home.
He was a year old. The home was run by the Missionaries of Charity, and the photographs were taken in the days around the handover, in the spring of 1996. Everything that follows on this page, the farm, the fjord, the sky at seventy degrees north, starts in that room.
Photographs from the family album. Photographer unknown.
The route north
Six countries' worth of work before the northern lights became the job.
Kolkata → Brussels
Adopted from India to Belgium at one year old. Belgium is home until he is sixteen.
The first farm
He leaves school at sixteen and goes to Norway to work on a sheep farm. The same year, he takes his first photographs of the northern lights.
Ireland
Care work with people with disabilities: Down's syndrome, autism, wheelchair users. Vegetables planted and harvested in between.
India
Back to the country he was born in, doing the same care work. Then Belgium once more, and it doesn't fit any more.
Five years of sheep and snow
Norway again. Lambing night shifts, turning lambs that came the wrong way, herding the flock down from the mountains before winter. Round bales, timber, a new barn built by hand, and a season in a fish factory.
Kindergarten, coastline, classroom
Work in a kindergarten, then three summer seasons clearing waste from the coasts of Sørøya, Seiland and Kvaløya. A year teaching first grade, a few months in a care home.
Most of the time: photography
Northern lights, nature, the low sun. In November 2025 his photographs of a rare red aurora were published by NRK and Dagbladet.
03 / Why the aurora
I feel completely fantastic when I see the northern lights. It was pure magic.
Simon Withagen to Dagbladet · November 2025
Hammerfest lies at 70°38′ north, directly under the auroral oval, the ring where the lights are most frequent on earth. From late August to mid-April, on any clear night, the sky over Rypefjord can open.
Simon has been photographing it since 2012 from the same few kilometres of coast: the same fjord, the same ridges, the same town lights reflected in the water, and a sky that has never once repeated itself.
Work with Simon
Buy a photograph, licence one for print, or come out under the sky with him for a night.