The exhibition is made up of photos taken nearly 50 years ago by acclaimed cinematographer Ago Ruus, who was documenting a doomed Arctic expedition that started at the turn of the last century.

Through the images, Ruus not only documents the Arctic landscape but also invites viewers to contemplate what drives humans to explore the unknown.

At the time he took the images, as a young cinematographer, he was filming a movie about the Estonian-born polar explorer Eduard von Toll.

Speaking about his rationale for the present-day exhibition, Ruus said: "It is that mysterious call, the one that pulls people beyond the horizon, that makes them breathe faster and their hearts tremble when they reach some distant land, an endless shore, or the mountains.

"And it was this same force that drove scientists and explorers to seek out that mysterious land, despite all the hardships."

"That expedition, of course, ended sadly," he went on.

"As a result, two years later, they went missing in the north—who knows what happened to them? As for Sannikov Land, it was only in 1934, if I'm not mistaken, that it was officially acknowledged that such a land didn't exist at all—that it was a mirage."

Titled Kutse, the exhibition can be seen at the Võru County Museum (Vana-Võromaa Kultuurikoda) gallery and showcases images from his first film shoot in the Arctic way back in 1977.

At the time, as a young cinematographer, he was filming an eponymous biopic called Eduard Toll. Kiindumused, a project he undertook as a third-year student at the Moscow Film Institute.

With a screenplay written by the future president of Estonia, Lennart Meri (1929–2006), the movie depicted Toll's expedition in search of the mythical Sannikov Land and required Ruus to gain real experience by accompanying an Arctic expedition.

This allowed him to capture both moving and still images of the Arctic landscape; it is the stills, which he has only now, decades later, reflected upon and revisited, that form the core of the new exhibition.

Ruus, 75, a native of Võru County, is a respected researcher of South Estonian photographers and has worked as a cinematographer on many well-known Tallinnfilm productions, including Nukitsamees (1981) and Kõrboja peremees (1979).

He collaborated with Lennart Meri on several movies too.

The Kutse exhibition will be open at the Võru County Museum on Katariina allee 11 in Võru town center until the last days of March.

Born in Tallinn, Eduard von Toll (1858–1902), properly speaking a geologist, led the ill-fated Russian Polar Expedition (1900–1903) to find Sannikov Land, but after getting trapped on the ice, he and his team vanished while attempting to reach the mainland from Bennett Island.

Sannikov Land itself (Russian: Земля Санникова) was a phantom island in the Arctic Ocean. Its supposed existence attracted attention in 19th-century Russia and elsewhere.

It was named after explorer Yakov Sannikov, who claimed to have seen the landmass during an expedition to the New Siberian Islands a century before Toll's last journey.

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