Tag: iceland

Vinson Smith – Flora Fauna (2017)

This was taken in Vík í Mýrdal, or Vík, on the southern coast of Iceland.

It’s a quaint little town. The main tourist draw is its utterly breathtaking black, volcanic sand beach. Also, there’s an iconic church position on some of the highest terrain in town. Here’s a film photo I took one of the half-dozen times I’ve been there:

image

The rock formation in the background of the first image is called Reynisdrangar. It’s a basalt sea stack.

But there’s a folk story about the sea stacks–two night trolls stole a ship and we’re dragging it back to shore. Unfortunately, the boat was either too heavy or they were further from their cave than they planned because they were caught by the rising sun and immediately turned to stone.

Source unknown – Nicole Vaunt (2017)

Few places I have ever visited have gotten so thoroughly under my skin as Iceland. If my Seasonal Affective Disorder wasn’t already off-the-charts, I would have moved there by now.

What’s so great about it? If I told you it’s because it’s magical, there would be two distinct  responses: those who will grin stupidly/nod knowingly & those will look askance/skeptical–the former have visited, the latter have not.

I could talk about the light. But the light in-and-of-itself is not entirely exceptional. If you’ve watched any of Bergman’s films–you’ll understand why he and Sven Nyquist strove to work with natural light whenever possible. (Arctic light in the summer is pretty much ripped out of a Romantic Period oil painting.)

The landscape might as well be off-world–the stunning vibrancy of color contrasted against the harsh landscape is something that stops you in your tracks at least a half dozen times each day.

It’s not all rainbows and kittens: most folks view Iceland as a sort of Viking inhabited glacier. (I started having dreams about the place during my middle teens and it was all snowbound and empty. I found out after about a decade of having the dreams that Iceland is green and Greenland is ice–in fact, viking languages were apparently uber literal because the capital of Reykjavik means nothing more or less than ‘smoky bay’ and Iceland in the native languague is really Island; it’s westerners that make it seem like a stronghold of winter.) The weather is hardly perfect. I’ve seen it rain sideways while it’s still blindingly sunny. (But as the saying goes: if you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes–as is that ever the fucking truth.)

What appeals to me about this image is the degree to which it–by decontextualizing both the relationship of the landscape to light and color, it demonstrates the degree to which the landscape has texture. (I think that’s something I’ve always felt on an instinctive level but it would’ve taken me several more trips to come to that realization on my own. And as far as I’m concerned that’s really the single credo you need when asking whether or not a photo or image is good: does it show me how to see something that I might otherwise have never discovered? If the answer is yes, then that’s already more than halfway there.)

Agnieszka Sosnowska – Lansendi, Iceland (2012)

I first encountered Sosnowska’s work through Lensculture’s underwhelming showcase of her work.

Several months later, I caught a broader cross section of her work as part of the Traces of Life exhibition at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography.

What struck me immediately was how good her printmaking chops were and how her digital presence seemed almost completely devoid of life by comparison.

Yet what strikes me looking at this photo which–excepting the stunningly luminous range in skin-tone and subtle gradations in the sky, which my guess would be were burnt in–limits everything in the frame to three zones: the textured black sand (Zone II), the dark grey rocks (Zone IV) and the sky (Zone IX).

It’s also interesting to note how Sosnowska has been working with variations on the idea of the image for more than a decade. For homework: compare and contrast the above with this photo from 2007.

marason:

Sögur/Stories

Sigurður Mar Halldórsson – Untitled from Sögur/Stories series (2015)

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in one of the best TV shows of all time: Breaking Bad.

There’s something primal about the struggle of bone, sinew and skin trying to excavate the landscape. It’s mysterious, edgy and the amount of exertion required to make any progress is damn near monumental. (I think all of these reasons feed into the trope of characters digging their own grave under the watchful eye of a menacing captor–you really can’t approach the violence done to the earth without a mixture of literally morbid curiosity and dread.

Visually, this is a dynamic image. There’s a sense of heft and twist and flex of the physical motion conveyed in the pose. The mud streaked skin and fabric as well as the earth that has been cast aside all indicate this is only the beginning of a grueling task.

Insofar as the image is logically suggestive of a time that there was not a hole in the location, the present moment where a hole is perhaps beginning to yawn (more on that in a bit) and a point in the future when their will be a deep hole, it is flirting with narrativity. However, without an indication of the purpose for the hole, it only fits itself to the structure of narrative.

I will concede that there’s a fairly good chance this image is intended to reference an Icelandic Saga with which I am sadly unfamiliar. (The fact that it appears her shovel is currently empty and also that she is standing in the hole she is digging up to her shins in water leads me to this thought.)

However, whether or not it is supposed to refer to a widely known story, the fact that it the purpose of the hole is left so ambiguous, is actually very disappointing. I can’t really fully level the criticism I want here because I don’t know where the image was headed–although it seems very confident in itself. (Rightly so, for the most part.) Consider though how–and these are all cheesy cliche suggestions–the image would improve for the edge of a treasure chest in frame or the legs of a dead body.

In fact, as I think there’s something of an edgier tone and I get an amorphous feeling that the woman in this frame might very well have thinly veiled self-destructive motivations, a composite of her digging and then her body laying on the ground would’ve proved breathtaking in its simplicity and clarity.

Source: marason

Silja Magg – Untitled (201X)

Despite the fact that this sacrifices proper exposure for pushed contrast, I’d post it on the strength of the interplay between the tattered outfit and the gorgeous skin tone highlights.

But, I’m mostly posting it because it was taken on the volcanic black sands of Vík beach in Ísland, or as you’re probably more familiar with seeing it: Iceland.

The way that many of the misogynist literary giants write about how Africa gets under your skin is the way I feel about Iceland.

I’ve dreamed about it on a recurring basis since I was approximately eight. Initially, in these dreams I’d find myself in the middle of a vast expanse of arctic terrain. In the way dream logic works, I just felt that this was Iceland. It was a number of years before someone informed me of the epigraph: Iceland is green and Greenland is ice.

The dreams continued but shifted: I’d be on my way to the airport to fly to Iceland. But there’d be traffic or I’d have forgotten my passport.

Finally, two years ago, despite being unemployed, I through caution into the wind and spent a week there.

I’m not yet to a point where I can articulate the impact of this trip. All I can say is that I’ve booked tickets to visit again at the end of the summer.

I could never live in Iceland. Being as I suffer from severe Season Affective Disorder, the paltry 3 daylight (3 hours in Reykjavik at Solstice) would quite literally kill me. But it’s a place where I feel strangely not at home but in my element.

All that is merely to introduce the fact that as Iceland becomes an increasingly popular vacation destination and more and more photographers tap into the alien beauty of the land, there are sadly fewer and fewer images like this that so effectively encapsulate the feeling of being there that they make my soul ache with the most profound longing.