Iceland: land of fire and ice. A land of turbulent change and rebirth, a new earth, geologically some of the youngest, freshest earth on the planet. Here, I lost myself in rediscovering our planet. Shapes, forms, colors, and textures previously unknown to me revealed themselves. Formations, bubblings, gurglings, quakings, tumblings, the crashing of waves and the soaring of wind through emptiness. The first images I took here, I focused on capturing this diverse nature in its solitude, avoiding any signs of human life. I edited these photos to enhance and heighten their magic wildness and rich and vibrant colors.
However, in photographing landscapes, I found I was much more interested in the human relationships with these places than the places themselves. I began to include human life within the landscapes, realizing they are in fact inseparable. These days, the truth is that the wonders of Iceland are surrounded by people. Indistinct humans became the subject of most of my work there. How do we interact with places of beauty? Why do we go? What are we all doing here? What is tourism in this decade? How are we interacting with the space and people around us- the ones we came with, the strangers next to us...? What are we seeing, feeling, experiencing?
One experience during an all night walk gave me a new perspective on life there in Iceland and inspired new work. I’ll begin this story with my hike up to the hot river. I hiked up for miles in the cold, passing the occasional sheep to make my way up to this hot river I was told about by a local. Finally, I smelled sulphur and was engulfed in clouds of steam emanating from the earth. Stripping my clothes off in the soft icy rain, I ran to dip myself in the warmest part of the river, at the top. Slowly, I entered and sighed and my body relaxed as I eased myself down into its shallow depths of warmth. I found an area where I could lay completely flat and the majority of my body was submerged in the sulphorous heat while a thin layer of my skin on the front side of my body could feel the cold drops of rain and my nose could protrude enough to breathe. My ears sunk down so I could hear the deep resonance of nothingess and I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the bones of my back body, deeper and deeper into the volcanic rocks of earth that had once been lava, deeper and deeper into the wisdom of Gaia, abyss. I stayed for hours; one didn’t need to worry about it getting dark. I think I ambled, blissed out, down the mountain around 10pm. I felt alive as the earth and the sky here, full of light and life. I didn’t want to go back where I was staying to sleep.
The light of eternal dawn guided me on a night journey to the coast. I didn’t know where I was going, just that I wanted to reach the coast. You wouldn’t know it was night except that the sounds of bird chirping and the already light presence of human noise and the occasional whirring car had come to a complete halt. I followed the river expecting it to lead me to the ocean. It did, eventually, in the most roundabout way possible. Rivers are not like roads. The windy ways of nature are not like the direct paths of man. It had something to teach me, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Unexpected gushing hot water, rocky paths, fluffy yet icy green grasses, a graveyard, unnerving construction sites, eerie suburbia and sleeping cows guided my way. I came upon construction machines standing still like giants, like part of the fantastical landscape, like elves part of some mythical legend. Except here they were in plain site, standing open to be mythologized with story of what they were and why they were here. A sudden sprawl of suburban houses appeared just as shockingly as the construction animals. Out of place, quaint.
These things belonged in the other world, the capitalist society, where humans had overrun. They didn’t belong in nature. In this wild place where nature reigned, the other world didn’t exist. Humans live here, in Iceland, too. I was faced with my fantasies of a place I loved and my delusions of paradise. I couldn’t help but think back to the project I had worked on all year before coming to Iceland called Alien Lands . Alien Lands was a photography, performance and video installation art experiment documenting the mythologization of palm trees connected to the colonization of Los Angeles and its profit driven creation of paradise. I had become the white colonizer exoticizing a place I had never seen before and creating images that supported that paradisical idea. It was this walk that shifted the way I saw this land and changed the images I was creating.
I now captured the mundane places, the signs of human existence. Yet my awe that this was place was supremely magical was so strong that even the human elements seemed a spectacle to behold. Even if they were as plain and ordinary as the ones back home; they were in this place that had some other kinda magic and that made them magic too. Even the puffing of steam stacks at the water plant was art, surrounded by nothing but mushy thick green moss land and chocolate brown, icing capped mountains for miles.
The fanciful imagination of Iceland as an untouched paradise was not totally true, but it was true enough to fill me with wonder and delight at all its spectacles, the simple and monumental. And it was true enough for human evidence to feel intrusive rather than the norm. The harsh contrast allowed me to see the invasiveness of simple human artifacts in a highlighted way. This contrast is what I wished to capture in my images of Iceland. So that maybe, we will look at what we’re doing, what we’re creating, what we’re destroying before it’s done, this time.
I did finally make it to the ocean, frozen at 5 am. Its soft waves felt sorrowful, as if remembering all who had died trying to reach its shore. I let the wind slash my skin for a while before returning the long journey home. I felt disassociated from my aching and freezing body, dematerialized into nothingness, I was not a body anymore, that was too painful. I just was. A thing that was moving forward. I took the more direct route back, on the road, rather than the river. Luckily, midway on my journey, an Icelandic family driving the first car I’d seen on the road since yesterday afternoon, saw me walking along and gave me a lift back. I was thankful.
