All photos © Ragnar Th Sigurdsson/www.arctic-images.com. Lightning, ash and lava from Eyjafjallajokull Eruption, Iceland.

Farm under Eyjafjallajokull Eruption with lightning, ash and lava, in Iceland.

Black Church, Budir Iceland, April 2007. © David Bram

In April of 2007, David Bram, photographer and editor/founder of Fraction Magazine spent 10 days in Iceland. A number of the Bram’s Icelandic photographs were exhibited at the photo-eye Bookstore, Santa Fe, in November 2009. To see more images from the project, please visit his website.

All Photos © Robert B. Haas. Bergs and boulders form islands of ice and rock in the basin of the Red Glacier, Alaska.

Since 2002, Robert B. Haas has focused exclusively on aerial photography in a quest to capture the grandeur of all Earth’s large landmasses from the air. “Through the Eyes of the Vikings,” released today, is the third book in his collection. Hass, who previously transformed vistas of African and Latin American landscapes and cityscapes, has focused his lens on the regions that transect the Arctic Circle—Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland—which he photographed over a three-year period. This book tells a story about an endangered, raw region whose astonishing beauty is worth preserving for its own sake, and whose precarious fate will impact the entire planet.

Industrial by-products form a swirling palette at a waste-treatment facility on Langøya Island south of Oslo in Norway.

Dark clouds encroach upon the sweeping ice and snow in western Iceland.

A moose and its calf provide intersecting tracks along nearly pristine snow cover south of Inuvik in the Mackenzie River Delta, Canada.

Bay of Bothnia, Sweden. Recycling pools beside a lumber facility near the port city of Karlsborg pock the landscape like shots through tempered glass.

Snowmobile tracks crisscross the surface of a melting pond in Kiruna, Sweden.

A clam digger pokes away in search of supper along Cook Inlet in Clam Gulch, Alaska.

In Alaska, sunlight sparkles along the Neacola River’s banks and its tidal flats.

© Caleb Cain Marcus. Above: “Perito Moreno, Plate I, Patagonia, 2010.”

Caleb Cain Marcus’s new book, A Portrait of Ice, depicts the glaciers of Patagonia, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and Alaska. It is accompanied with essays by curator and critic Marvin Heiferman and Robin Bell, a senior researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

While on a trip to Patagonia, Marcus began to think about the role of a horizon. “As the boat that crossed Lake Argentino swayed back and forth, I thought about the oppression created by the lack of a horizon in an urban environment and what would happen if there was no visible horizon in the open space. What would happen if it vanished?,” he asks. To create a successful photograph he believes, “The preconceived line between the artist’s vision and what the subject resonates blurs until the influence from artist and subject can no longer be distinguished.” – courtesy of Caleb Cain Marcus.

“Fláajökull, Plate I, Iceland, 2010.”

“Nigardsbreen, Plate I, Norway, 2011.”

Last summer, New York City-based photographer Jeaneen Lund spent five weeks documenting the first and only Icelandic traveling circus on their first tour. Images from her project,”Sirkus Íslands,” are currently on view at Mengi in Reykjavik, Iceland. We asked Lund about the Sirkus, and how she plans to use images from the project to advance her career in photography.

Photo District News: What is Sirkus Íslands all about?

Jeaneen Lund: They have three different shows—one for kids, one for families, and a slightly naughty, tongue-in-cheek, adult cabaret. Sirkus Íslands is homegrown, animal-free, and sustained by the communal operation of a 24-person family. The performers handle all of the tasks—they raise the tent (even during extreme wind storms), prepare their own meals, sell popcorn and cotton candy, perform two to three shows a day, and bring 100 percent of their energy into each show. Over 22,000 people have attended their shows. Iceland’s a small country of 328,000 people, so they were quite happy with the turnout!

PDN: How did you find out about it?

JL: I met an amazing woman (Margrét) in 2012 when I was living in Iceland. We grabbed coffee while she was in New York last spring, and she told me she was organizing the first tour for Sirkus Íslands. Through Karolina Fund, a crowdfunding source based in Iceland, they raised enough money to buy a massive circus tent.

PDN: So this was a personal project, how did you promote it?

JL: Yes, this was a non-commissioned personal project which I felt very passionate about. In February 2015, I contacted several galleries around Reykjavik and told them about my project. My goal was to do an exhibition just before Sirkus went on their second tour, so locals and tourists could know about it. I found a great gallery in the middle of Reykjavik called Mengi, just off the main street. They loved the PDF I sent over and agreed to do a three-week show.

I also contacted the in-flight magazine of Icelandair (the Icelandic Tourist Board helped sponsor my flight) and the magazine asked me to write a photo essay of my experience. They published four pages with fourteen of my photos in their July/August 2015 issue.

The city of Reykjavik contacted me, too. They want to display 24 poster-size prints of my Sirkus photos on Skólavörðustígur, which is their main shopping street in Iceland. These photos will be in display cases for one month this summer.

I’ve been talking to book publishers about turning “Sirkus” into a book, and I plan on doing gallery shows in NYC and LA.

PDN: Do you plan to use it to help you get assignment work?

JL: I have a completely new body of work from this photo series, so I’ll use this to get assignment work. I decided to do the whole project with available light to keep it organic and true to the moments with the performers and the environments. These images would be great for all sorts of advertising clients. My commissioned work is a mix of music, fashion, portraits and travel, and I also love documenting sub-cultures. This Sirkus series is a good mix of all of these.

PDN: Who are some of the clients you work for?

JL: Nike, Microsoft, Nintendo, Vidal Sassoon, L’Officiel, OUT, Teen Vogue, Complex, Beautiful Savage, Bust, Nylon, SPIN, Vice, Untitled, EMI, Sony, Capitol, Mexican Summer, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk, Adele, Florence Welch, Diplo, Katy Perry and Kesha, and more.

I also create spontaneous editorial shoots and pitch them to magazines. The industry has changed so much over the years and I’d say, for me, 8o percent of my work is magazine editorial, and 20 percent advertising.

I also direct music videos and fashion films. I made a short fashion/fetish film with an Icelandic composer, which won a Jury Prize award in the ASVOFF film festival and premiered at the Pompidou in Paris.

PDN: When did you start shooting? When did you become a full-time “pro”?

JL: I grew up in Hollywood and I started taking photos of my friends in high school when we were out at the goth clubs in the ’90s. I took a photo class during my senior year in high school and I was obsessed! I also took one class for a semester in junior college. I worked at a camera rental place in Hollywood for a year and assisted photographers, which was my real school.

A year later, I flew to New York and met with magazines and started shooting for them the following week. I think that was in 1998. Back in the 1900s! I continued to assist for a couple more years and I became a full time “pro” after that.

PDN: What are you working on now?

JL: I just did a shoot with a talented young artist for Sony music in NYC, and I’m in Iceland now taking press photos of the world famous Shaman Durek, and doing a fashion shoot. Then I’m off to Paris to shoot a band’s promo/album packaging.

I was recently interviewed about a photo I took of Glenn Danzig. There’s a Facebook page called “The Same Photo of Glenn Danzig Every Day” and they chose my photo for the page. I had no clue about this, but it has over 36,000 followers and it’s pretty entertaining!

It is easy to forget that the North American Plate, the massive rock slab on which most of our continent sits, is moving. The powerful forces that shaped the tectonic plate’s eastern and western borders—and continue to change them—are the invisible subject of Marion Belanger’s series “Rift/Fault,” shot in Iceland and on the West Coast. Belanger photographed the Plate’s eastern boundary along the Atlantic Rift, where the North Atlantic Plate meets the Eurasian Plate, and on the western edge, where the North American Plate meets the Pacific Plate along California’s San Andreas Fault. In Iceland, the two plate edges are pulling apart, creating a raw, dramatic landscape, defined by volcanos, while on the western edge, the plates are scraping against each other and the landscape is smooth, rounded by time. In both places, Belanger shows how everyday life goes on despite the massive forces at work – houses are packed onto a hillside south of San Francisco, awaiting the next big one, and scattered across bright grass in Heimaey, Iceland, the site of a 1973 volcano.

“Rift/Fault – Landscape Photographs of the North American Continental Plate,” a show of Belanger’s work on view at Haverford College until December 6, pairs work from each side of the Plate, combining the violent Icelandic landscape with deceptively peaceful California topographies. Cool, milky light falls on the suburban houses and infrastructure of both, making their unseen connection visible and showing their linked fate. 

Related Stories:

Circus Sirkus

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Lending a Hand in Haiti

“I’ve always found the general idea of being a teenager something extremely beautiful, sad and complex,” says Camila Svenson in an email interview with PDN. The rituals and transitions of teenage life are at the heart of “you will never walk alone,” her series that uncovers the universal loneliness and thrill of being a young person in a small town. The images depict life in Húsavík, a town of about 2,200 on the north shore Iceland, where Svenson lived during an artist residency at Fjúk Art Centre. There are no majestic fjords or lava flows in the images she made during her two month stay. Instead, the photographs are mostly portraits of teenage residents, alone or in pairs and groups, lit by natural light at school or in their bedrooms, or pictured outdoors, in swimming pools or parked cars or at parties set in a subtle, empty landscape.

When Svenson arrived in Húsavík, the process of getting to know the local teenagers was not unlike being the new kid in town. “My first connection was with this girl called Ruth—her brother Eggert was always hanging out around the studios,” says Svenson. “She is 16 – and when we first met I’ve never felt so nervous in my life. I really forgot I was there to photograph, and I felt as if I was a teenager myself, who just moved into a new school. I had to make people like me, because I wanted to fit in the group.” In a statement about the project, Svenson describes a pizza party with Ruth and her friends. “My hands were sweating and my heart pounding…I forgot they were 16 and I was 26.” Despite her nervousness, she managed to win over the kids. “After that, I just started to meet more kids, and ask them about friends, and friends of friends—and so it goes. I think they were all pretty impressed by the fact that someone found them fascinating. Everyone was so open to being photographed.”

Svenson says the kids in Húsavík reminded her of growing up in Brazil. Before she arrived, she imagined them “as exotic figures.” But talking to them, she realized “we care about the same things.” Photographing them brought “a sense of nostalgia and memory so strong that it is as if I was photographing my own past, with my own friends…It is all about the girl who broke your heart, or being accepted in a group, to go to a party and drink from a tequila bottle and to feel like an outsider all the time—those little things are universal.” To emphasize the similarities, Svenson often shot indoors, “rather than showing Húsavik all the time. I think for me what was more important was their connections—how they work as a group of friends, or are isolated in their houses.”

In a statement about the project, Svenson describes going to a dance, where she felt both connected to her subjects and separate from them—a classic photographer’s dilemma. “I get invited to the country ball. I feel so excited. I put on a black dress and arrive at the place by 10pm. There is a huge line outside, it reminds me of the 15-year-old parties we used to go. Everyone is drinking from plastic bottles. I know how to sing all the songs. The small wood saloon gets filled up with kids dancing. They look so happy. They hug each other in huge groups while jumping and singing to Bon Jovi. I feel happy too, and I understand for the first time that I don’t belong there. That a photographer will never belong, and will always remain invisible. Nobody notices me, and I love that. I take photos of them dancing, kissing and drinking. I accept that I will always be an outsider, a stranger—for the first time that feels ok. By the end of the party, two boys start a fight outside. It’s almost morning, and they try to punch each other between all the fog. I take a photo of it.” —Rebecca Robertson

Related Stories:
Icelandic Lore
Forever Seventeen
Creative Nonfiction: Capturing Adolescence in Post-Recession Ireland

Last summer, New York City-based photographer Jeaneen Lund spent five weeks documenting the first and only Icelandic traveling circus on their first tour. Images from her project,”Sirkus Íslands,” are currently on view at Mengi in Reykjavik, Iceland. We asked Lund about the Sirkus, and how she plans to use images from the project to advance her career in photography.

Photo District News: What is Sirkus Íslands all about?

Jeaneen Lund: They have three different shows—one for kids, one for families, and a slightly naughty, tongue-in-cheek, adult cabaret. Sirkus Íslands is homegrown, animal-free, and sustained by the communal operation of a 24-person family. The performers handle all of the tasks—they raise the tent (even during extreme wind storms), prepare their own meals, sell popcorn and cotton candy, perform two to three shows a day, and bring 100 percent of their energy into each show. Over 22,000 people have attended their shows. Iceland’s a small country of 328,000 people, so they were quite happy with the turnout!

PDN: How did you find out about it?

JL: I met an amazing woman (Margrét) in 2012 when I was living in Iceland. We grabbed coffee while she was in New York last spring, and she told me she was organizing the first tour for Sirkus Íslands. Through Karolina Fund, a crowdfunding source based in Iceland, they raised enough money to buy a massive circus tent.

PDN: So this was a personal project, how did you promote it?

JL: Yes, this was a non-commissioned personal project which I felt very passionate about. In February 2015, I contacted several galleries around Reykjavik and told them about my project. My goal was to do an exhibition just before Sirkus went on their second tour, so locals and tourists could know about it. I found a great gallery in the middle of Reykjavik called Mengi, just off the main street. They loved the PDF I sent over and agreed to do a three-week show.

I also contacted the in-flight magazine of Icelandair (the Icelandic Tourist Board helped sponsor my flight) and the magazine asked me to write a photo essay of my experience. They published four pages with fourteen of my photos in their July/August 2015 issue.

The city of Reykjavik contacted me, too. They want to display 24 poster-size prints of my Sirkus photos on Skólavörðustígur, which is their main shopping street in Iceland. These photos will be in display cases for one month this summer.

I’ve been talking to book publishers about turning “Sirkus” into a book, and I plan on doing gallery shows in NYC and LA.

PDN: Do you plan to use it to help you get assignment work?

JL: I have a completely new body of work from this photo series, so I’ll use this to get assignment work. I decided to do the whole project with available light to keep it organic and true to the moments with the performers and the environments. These images would be great for all sorts of advertising clients. My commissioned work is a mix of music, fashion, portraits and travel, and I also love documenting sub-cultures. This Sirkus series is a good mix of all of these.

PDN: Who are some of the clients you work for?

JL: Nike, Microsoft, Nintendo, Vidal Sassoon, L’Officiel, OUT, Teen Vogue, Complex, Beautiful Savage, Bust, Nylon, SPIN, Vice, Untitled, EMI, Sony, Capitol, Mexican Summer, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk, Adele, Florence Welch, Diplo, Katy Perry and Kesha, and more.

I also create spontaneous editorial shoots and pitch them to magazines. The industry has changed so much over the years and I’d say, for me, 8o percent of my work is magazine editorial, and 20 percent advertising.

I also direct music videos and fashion films. I made a short fashion/fetish film with an Icelandic composer, which won a Jury Prize award in the ASVOFF film festival and premiered at the Pompidou in Paris.

PDN: When did you start shooting? When did you become a full-time “pro”?

JL: I grew up in Hollywood and I started taking photos of my friends in high school when we were out at the goth clubs in the ’90s. I took a photo class during my senior year in high school and I was obsessed! I also took one class for a semester in junior college. I worked at a camera rental place in Hollywood for a year and assisted photographers, which was my real school.

A year later, I flew to New York and met with magazines and started shooting for them the following week. I think that was in 1998. Back in the 1900s! I continued to assist for a couple more years and I became a full time “pro” after that.

PDN: What are you working on now?

JL: I just did a shoot with a talented young artist for Sony music in NYC, and I’m in Iceland now taking press photos of the world famous Shaman Durek, and doing a fashion shoot. Then I’m off to Paris to shoot a band’s promo/album packaging.

I was recently interviewed about a photo I took of Glenn Danzig. There’s a Facebook page called “The Same Photo of Glenn Danzig Every Day” and they chose my photo for the page. I had no clue about this, but it has over 36,000 followers and it’s pretty entertaining!

It is easy to forget that the North American Plate, the massive rock slab on which most of our continent sits, is moving. The powerful forces that shaped the tectonic plate’s eastern and western borders—and continue to change them—are the invisible subject of Marion Belanger’s series “Rift/Fault,” shot in Iceland and on the West Coast. Belanger photographed the Plate’s eastern boundary along the Atlantic Rift, where the North Atlantic Plate meets the Eurasian Plate, and on the western edge, where the North American Plate meets the Pacific Plate along California’s San Andreas Fault. In Iceland, the two plate edges are pulling apart, creating a raw, dramatic landscape, defined by volcanos, while on the western edge, the plates are scraping against each other and the landscape is smooth, rounded by time. In both places, Belanger shows how everyday life goes on despite the massive forces at work – houses are packed onto a hillside south of San Francisco, awaiting the next big one, and scattered across bright grass in Heimaey, Iceland, the site of a 1973 volcano.

“Rift/Fault – Landscape Photographs of the North American Continental Plate,” a show of Belanger’s work on view at Haverford College until December 6, pairs work from each side of the Plate, combining the violent Icelandic landscape with deceptively peaceful California topographies. Cool, milky light falls on the suburban houses and infrastructure of both, making their unseen connection visible and showing their linked fate. 

Related Stories:

Circus Sirkus

Red-Hot

Lending a Hand in Haiti

“I’ve always found the general idea of being a teenager something extremely beautiful, sad and complex,” says Camila Svenson in an email interview with PDN. The rituals and transitions of teenage life are at the heart of “you will never walk alone,” her series that uncovers the universal loneliness and thrill of being a young person in a small town. The images depict life in Húsavík, a town of about 2,200 on the north shore Iceland, where Svenson lived during an artist residency at Fjúk Art Centre. There are no majestic fjords or lava flows in the images she made during her two month stay. Instead, the photographs are mostly portraits of teenage residents, alone or in pairs and groups, lit by natural light at school or in their bedrooms, or pictured outdoors, in swimming pools or parked cars or at parties set in a subtle, empty landscape.

When Svenson arrived in Húsavík, the process of getting to know the local teenagers was not unlike being the new kid in town. “My first connection was with this girl called Ruth—her brother Eggert was always hanging out around the studios,” says Svenson. “She is 16 – and when we first met I’ve never felt so nervous in my life. I really forgot I was there to photograph, and I felt as if I was a teenager myself, who just moved into a new school. I had to make people like me, because I wanted to fit in the group.” In a statement about the project, Svenson describes a pizza party with Ruth and her friends. “My hands were sweating and my heart pounding…I forgot they were 16 and I was 26.” Despite her nervousness, she managed to win over the kids. “After that, I just started to meet more kids, and ask them about friends, and friends of friends—and so it goes. I think they were all pretty impressed by the fact that someone found them fascinating. Everyone was so open to being photographed.”

Svenson says the kids in Húsavík reminded her of growing up in Brazil. Before she arrived, she imagined them “as exotic figures.” But talking to them, she realized “we care about the same things.” Photographing them brought “a sense of nostalgia and memory so strong that it is as if I was photographing my own past, with my own friends…It is all about the girl who broke your heart, or being accepted in a group, to go to a party and drink from a tequila bottle and to feel like an outsider all the time—those little things are universal.” To emphasize the similarities, Svenson often shot indoors, “rather than showing Húsavik all the time. I think for me what was more important was their connections—how they work as a group of friends, or are isolated in their houses.”

In a statement about the project, Svenson describes going to a dance, where she felt both connected to her subjects and separate from them—a classic photographer’s dilemma. “I get invited to the country ball. I feel so excited. I put on a black dress and arrive at the place by 10pm. There is a huge line outside, it reminds me of the 15-year-old parties we used to go. Everyone is drinking from plastic bottles. I know how to sing all the songs. The small wood saloon gets filled up with kids dancing. They look so happy. They hug each other in huge groups while jumping and singing to Bon Jovi. I feel happy too, and I understand for the first time that I don’t belong there. That a photographer will never belong, and will always remain invisible. Nobody notices me, and I love that. I take photos of them dancing, kissing and drinking. I accept that I will always be an outsider, a stranger—for the first time that feels ok. By the end of the party, two boys start a fight outside. It’s almost morning, and they try to punch each other between all the fog. I take a photo of it.” —Rebecca Robertson

Related Stories:
Icelandic Lore
Forever Seventeen
Creative Nonfiction: Capturing Adolescence in Post-Recession Ireland

Last summer, New York City-based photographer Jeaneen Lund spent five weeks documenting the first and only Icelandic traveling circus on their first tour. Images from her project,”Sirkus Íslands,” are currently on view at Mengi in Reykjavik, Iceland. We asked Lund about the Sirkus, and how she plans to use images from the project to advance her career in photography.

Photo District News: What is Sirkus Íslands all about?

Jeaneen Lund: They have three different shows—one for kids, one for families, and a slightly naughty, tongue-in-cheek, adult cabaret. Sirkus Íslands is homegrown, animal-free, and sustained by the communal operation of a 24-person family. The performers handle all of the tasks—they raise the tent (even during extreme wind storms), prepare their own meals, sell popcorn and cotton candy, perform two to three shows a day, and bring 100 percent of their energy into each show. Over 22,000 people have attended their shows. Iceland’s a small country of 328,000 people, so they were quite happy with the turnout!

PDN: How did you find out about it?

JL: I met an amazing woman (Margrét) in 2012 when I was living in Iceland. We grabbed coffee while she was in New York last spring, and she told me she was organizing the first tour for Sirkus Íslands. Through Karolina Fund, a crowdfunding source based in Iceland, they raised enough money to buy a massive circus tent.

PDN: So this was a personal project, how did you promote it?

JL: Yes, this was a non-commissioned personal project which I felt very passionate about. In February 2015, I contacted several galleries around Reykjavik and told them about my project. My goal was to do an exhibition just before Sirkus went on their second tour, so locals and tourists could know about it. I found a great gallery in the middle of Reykjavik called Mengi, just off the main street. They loved the PDF I sent over and agreed to do a three-week show.

I also contacted the in-flight magazine of Icelandair (the Icelandic Tourist Board helped sponsor my flight) and the magazine asked me to write a photo essay of my experience. They published four pages with fourteen of my photos in their July/August 2015 issue.

The city of Reykjavik contacted me, too. They want to display 24 poster-size prints of my Sirkus photos on Skólavörðustígur, which is their main shopping street in Iceland. These photos will be in display cases for one month this summer.

I’ve been talking to book publishers about turning “Sirkus” into a book, and I plan on doing gallery shows in NYC and LA.

PDN: Do you plan to use it to help you get assignment work?

JL: I have a completely new body of work from this photo series, so I’ll use this to get assignment work. I decided to do the whole project with available light to keep it organic and true to the moments with the performers and the environments. These images would be great for all sorts of advertising clients. My commissioned work is a mix of music, fashion, portraits and travel, and I also love documenting sub-cultures. This Sirkus series is a good mix of all of these.

PDN: Who are some of the clients you work for?

JL: Nike, Microsoft, Nintendo, Vidal Sassoon, L’Officiel, OUT, Teen Vogue, Complex, Beautiful Savage, Bust, Nylon, SPIN, Vice, Untitled, EMI, Sony, Capitol, Mexican Summer, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk, Adele, Florence Welch, Diplo, Katy Perry and Kesha, and more.

I also create spontaneous editorial shoots and pitch them to magazines. The industry has changed so much over the years and I’d say, for me, 8o percent of my work is magazine editorial, and 20 percent advertising.

I also direct music videos and fashion films. I made a short fashion/fetish film with an Icelandic composer, which won a Jury Prize award in the ASVOFF film festival and premiered at the Pompidou in Paris.

PDN: When did you start shooting? When did you become a full-time “pro”?

JL: I grew up in Hollywood and I started taking photos of my friends in high school when we were out at the goth clubs in the ’90s. I took a photo class during my senior year in high school and I was obsessed! I also took one class for a semester in junior college. I worked at a camera rental place in Hollywood for a year and assisted photographers, which was my real school.

A year later, I flew to New York and met with magazines and started shooting for them the following week. I think that was in 1998. Back in the 1900s! I continued to assist for a couple more years and I became a full time “pro” after that.

PDN: What are you working on now?

JL: I just did a shoot with a talented young artist for Sony music in NYC, and I’m in Iceland now taking press photos of the world famous Shaman Durek, and doing a fashion shoot. Then I’m off to Paris to shoot a band’s promo/album packaging.

I was recently interviewed about a photo I took of Glenn Danzig. There’s a Facebook page called “The Same Photo of Glenn Danzig Every Day” and they chose my photo for the page. I had no clue about this, but it has over 36,000 followers and it’s pretty entertaining!

It is easy to forget that the North American Plate, the massive rock slab on which most of our continent sits, is moving. The powerful forces that shaped the tectonic plate’s eastern and western borders—and continue to change them—are the invisible subject of Marion Belanger’s series “Rift/Fault,” shot in Iceland and on the West Coast. Belanger photographed the Plate’s eastern boundary along the Atlantic Rift, where the North Atlantic Plate meets the Eurasian Plate, and on the western edge, where the North American Plate meets the Pacific Plate along California’s San Andreas Fault. In Iceland, the two plate edges are pulling apart, creating a raw, dramatic landscape, defined by volcanos, while on the western edge, the plates are scraping against each other and the landscape is smooth, rounded by time. In both places, Belanger shows how everyday life goes on despite the massive forces at work – houses are packed onto a hillside south of San Francisco, awaiting the next big one, and scattered across bright grass in Heimaey, Iceland, the site of a 1973 volcano.

“Rift/Fault – Landscape Photographs of the North American Continental Plate,” a show of Belanger’s work on view at Haverford College until December 6, pairs work from each side of the Plate, combining the violent Icelandic landscape with deceptively peaceful California topographies. Cool, milky light falls on the suburban houses and infrastructure of both, making their unseen connection visible and showing their linked fate. 

Related Stories:

Circus Sirkus

Red-Hot

Lending a Hand in Haiti

“I’ve always found the general idea of being a teenager something extremely beautiful, sad and complex,” says Camila Svenson in an email interview with PDN. The rituals and transitions of teenage life are at the heart of “you will never walk alone,” her series that uncovers the universal loneliness and thrill of being a young person in a small town. The images depict life in Húsavík, a town of about 2,200 on the north shore Iceland, where Svenson lived during an artist residency at Fjúk Art Centre. There are no majestic fjords or lava flows in the images she made during her two month stay. Instead, the photographs are mostly portraits of teenage residents, alone or in pairs and groups, lit by natural light at school or in their bedrooms, or pictured outdoors, in swimming pools or parked cars or at parties set in a subtle, empty landscape.

When Svenson arrived in Húsavík, the process of getting to know the local teenagers was not unlike being the new kid in town. “My first connection was with this girl called Ruth—her brother Eggert was always hanging out around the studios,” says Svenson. “She is 16 – and when we first met I’ve never felt so nervous in my life. I really forgot I was there to photograph, and I felt as if I was a teenager myself, who just moved into a new school. I had to make people like me, because I wanted to fit in the group.” In a statement about the project, Svenson describes a pizza party with Ruth and her friends. “My hands were sweating and my heart pounding…I forgot they were 16 and I was 26.” Despite her nervousness, she managed to win over the kids. “After that, I just started to meet more kids, and ask them about friends, and friends of friends—and so it goes. I think they were all pretty impressed by the fact that someone found them fascinating. Everyone was so open to being photographed.”

Svenson says the kids in Húsavík reminded her of growing up in Brazil. Before she arrived, she imagined them “as exotic figures.” But talking to them, she realized “we care about the same things.” Photographing them brought “a sense of nostalgia and memory so strong that it is as if I was photographing my own past, with my own friends…It is all about the girl who broke your heart, or being accepted in a group, to go to a party and drink from a tequila bottle and to feel like an outsider all the time—those little things are universal.” To emphasize the similarities, Svenson often shot indoors, “rather than showing Húsavik all the time. I think for me what was more important was their connections—how they work as a group of friends, or are isolated in their houses.”

In a statement about the project, Svenson describes going to a dance, where she felt both connected to her subjects and separate from them—a classic photographer’s dilemma. “I get invited to the country ball. I feel so excited. I put on a black dress and arrive at the place by 10pm. There is a huge line outside, it reminds me of the 15-year-old parties we used to go. Everyone is drinking from plastic bottles. I know how to sing all the songs. The small wood saloon gets filled up with kids dancing. They look so happy. They hug each other in huge groups while jumping and singing to Bon Jovi. I feel happy too, and I understand for the first time that I don’t belong there. That a photographer will never belong, and will always remain invisible. Nobody notices me, and I love that. I take photos of them dancing, kissing and drinking. I accept that I will always be an outsider, a stranger—for the first time that feels ok. By the end of the party, two boys start a fight outside. It’s almost morning, and they try to punch each other between all the fog. I take a photo of it.” —Rebecca Robertson

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The Priest’s Ravine by Marzena Skubatz is a portrait of one of the smallest communities in Iceland, Solbrekka, which is situated on Mjoifjordur, one of the most isolated fjords in the country. The so called “Golden Age of Herring,” is long gone, when the village was a hub for the fishing industry. Fishing defined people’s lives in Solbrekka; now many homes sit empty, hinting at better times.

Skubatz has visited Solbrekka every year since 2012, when 18 people lived in the fjord. Now three families, totaling eight people, remain and the school has closed. The only child is 14-year-old Johanna, who “endures life with indifference.” The Priest’s Ravine documents the last people living on Mjoifjordur and preserves a slice of its history.

Seduced by the tranquility of Mjoifjordur, Skubatz documents the daily routine of a community frozen in time.

In the book, Skubatz writes: Fusi and his wife stayed. He was born in the village and is now mayor. Seivur and Erna also stayed, along with Regina and her husband – continuing to fish, although now only taking enough for their small community. Besides fishing Regina has a few sheep. But the unpredictable, harsh climate and physically demanding work involved in living in such a remote location are not attractive prospects for young Icelanders to continue the family farms. Many of them move to larger cities, and the old homes become holiday homes.

The book’s title, The Priest’s Ravine, refers to an Icelandic folktale about a giant troll woman who seduced the village’s priests to leave their church so she could eat the parishioners. One priest succeeded in driving the troll crazy by making hellish noises, freeing the valley from her. Even if the people on Mjoifjordur are no longer driven out by mystical figures, the seclusion of Solbrekka and hardship of daily life leads them to leave their homes sooner or later.

Marzena Skubatz was born in 1978 in Gleiwitz, Poland and has lived in Germany since 1989. She works on personal projects and on commissioned editorial work. Her fascination for remote and inaccessible environments has brought her to the North, where she explores the intimate lives and persistence of people in isolated places.

–Sarah Stacke

The Priest’s Ravine
By Marzena Skubatz
Published by Another Place

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Kaffibarinn, a bar in Reykjavík, Iceland, opened its doors for the first time in 1993. The bar was an overnight hit, attracting artists, musicians, media types, and other cool kids and creatures of the night. The crowd had a huge lust for life and created an atmosphere of sweet innocence and hardcore partying.

As the name suggests, Barflies: Reykjavik 2, published by PowerHouse Books is a follow-up book. As in the fist book, the people portrayed by the Snorri Bros are Kaffibarinn regulars. Some of the faces will be recognized, but now they’re a quarter of a century older. All of the portraits were shot at Kaffibarinn; each are framed in the same way and shot on the same Hasselblad camera, with the same 50mm silver lens, against the same background, and with the same lighting. The Snorri Bros exposed only one frame of each subject.

Kaffibarinn’s location in the old part of Reykjavík makes it a central spot to stop for coffee, tea or a few pints. After midnight, it morphs into one heaving dance floor. It’s these electric nights that have cemented Kaffibarinn’s status and changed Reykjavík’s nightlife forever.

Barflies: Reykjavik 2
By the Snorr Bros
PowerHouse Books

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“Zack Seckler | Above” features aerial photography from Iceland, Botswana and South Africa. The exhibition opens at ClampArt on June 27th. 

In his mission to capture aerial views of land, sea and wildlife, Zack Seckler flies in tiny, single propeller aircrafts, offering an extraordinary perspective of some of the planet’s most remote locations. Looking down from elevations between 50 and 500 feet, the landscape fades in and out of the recognizable. “That’s what really draws me in,” writes Seckler in the show’s press release, “the line between reality and abstraction.”

For Seckler, shooting from the sky “simplifies the landscape” while also revealing “complexities” of the natural world that are largely hidden from the human eye. The horizonless photographs, which capture zebras, flamingos, seabirds, the occasional human, swirling crystalline seas, and much more, hover in the realm of the magical.

“Zack Seckler | Above”
ClampArt
June 27 – August 9, 2019
Opening Reception June 27

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In 01:20 (Hatje Cantz, 2019) Bastiaan van Aarle documents the continuous midnight sun in Ólafsfjörður, Iceland, during the month of July. His photographs create a record of one of nature’s spectacles, as well as a portrait of Icelandic life.

Every year in Ólafsfjörður, the sun briefly touches the horizon on the first day of July and then immediately rises. Over the ensuing days it sinks lower and lower, until night gradually returns. The 31 photographs in 01:20 were taken over the course of 31 nights, the shutter clicking at precisely 1:20 am, the darkest moment of the day during July. The book visualizes the changes in light, until darkness finally descends on the quiet fishing village.

01:20 also reveals aspects of daily life in this geographically isolated spot. Only the traces of human beings can be discerned in the environment: dilapidated containers, rusted industrial ruins, parked cars. Like many Icelandic villages, it is made up of houses with corrugated metal roofs, a church near the harbor, a few shops, a gas station, a fish processing factory, a swimming pool, a hotel, and a school. “It tells a lot about the culture, about the way that houses are built, how the people cooperate,” says van Aarle about this aspect of his project.

In 01:20, van Aarle captures Ólafsfjörður as an alternative to today’s globalized world.

Bastiaan van Aarle (b. 1988, Belgium) is a conceptual landscape photographer who works around questions of the human influence on the landscape and the concept of time in photography.

01:20
By Bastiaan van Aarle
Hatje Cantz (2019)

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