Lost in Iceland by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson

// Photo // Photos by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson // Preface by Guðmundur Andri Thorsson // Éditions Forlagið // Publication: 2002 // 160 pages // 35 euros //

Photographing Iceland is quite perilous. Not because of the weather conditions (although they can be capricious) or the vagaries of the terrain (always rugged), but mainly because the country, like other popular tourist destinations, is over-photographed, over-exposed, with its share of Northern Lights, sheep on the roads and horses with their hair blowing in the wind, black beaches battered by the wind.

All this is true but does not reflect the telluric power felt when treading on the lava fields, the resistance that one sometimes has to oppose to the wind to move forward, the noise of the countless birds that populate the coasts, steep or not.

Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson's photographs capture the sensations experienced in this now rare context, which escapes human influence. Captioned, they also allow us to navigate the profusion of landscapes and connect them to the real and imaginary stories in which they have been the backdrop and, more often than not, the decisive actors.

"In fact - writes Guðmundur Andri Thorsson - until recent decades, the history of Icelanders has been nothing but an uninterrupted series of defeats at the hands of the unleashed forces of nature" and then further: Faced with these photographs of the nature of his country, the Icelander certainly admires its beauty, but somewhere within him lies the awareness that this nature could also turn against him and be fatal to him."