Landscape of Ice and Fire
The boredom hits almost immediately, but it is a different category of boring—more a long, slow unraveling of expectations.
There’s a kind of clarity Iceland forces on you. Its landscapes erase distraction not by offering peace, but by stripping away the options. Around Reykjavík, you can still find the familiar scaffolding of a city—cafes, groceries, taxicabs—but drive twenty minutes in any direction and that all disappears. It’s not minimalism; it’s absence.
There is something breathtaking and terrifying about that. In the open expanse, you can immediately sense the inhospitable nature of this land. Its beauty resists human contact—spare, otherworldly, indifferent. What those early Norse settlers must have seen when they first arrived: no forests to speak of, thin soil, Arctic winters, skies that expand forever, glaciers cutting through twisted volcanic rock, lava fields and boiling mud, and terrain that looks like the very edge of the world.
Trying to capture that vast and ancient landscape on camera is as elusive as a dream. You compose the shot, adjust exposure, reframe—but you keep missing it, like trying to catch the pause between heartbeats. When you look at the photos days, months, or years later, the waterfall looks smaller, the fog is static, the sky too murky, the moss not quite that shade of otherworldly green, and the rocks don’t have the same menace. Like a dream you almost remember, it’s so real in the moment and yet disintegrating on recall. That’s because its form, the feeling was never visual. It was the weird gravity of the air. The way the land whispered something old.
Suddenly, you remember to look for your friend who, in the time you’ve been firing off thirty photos of the same 3,000-year-old volcanic lake, has made her way up the side of the crater. She appears to be the size of an ant in silhouette. And the thought comes into your mind that you are just a brief flicker on this windswept plain.
NOTE: For the photos below, you can read the captions by mousing over the image or, if on mobile, clicking on the white dot at the bottom right of the screen.
