Sagas by Olivier Joly

// Photo // published: November 2021 // Hemeria editions // 140 B&W photographs, three-color printing, baryta photo print effect //

There is a very particular light in the photos that Olivier Joly brought back from his stays in the Highlands of Iceland(1): the light of black and its infinite nuances, its thousand shimmers. Olivier Joly photographs in black and white a landscape often in black and white, obviously austere, grandiose, where the scales merge.

But the author also captures moments of the daily lives of the inhabitants of these remote regions, because yes, there are indeed living souls, as evidenced by this beautiful painting of a pastor at the doorstep of his tiny black church lost in the snowy immensity. It could have been a scene photographed 50 years ago or painted a century ago. Like the scale of the landscape, that of time always gets a little muddled in Iceland.

The remarkably edited work is also punctuated by very brief but precise and documented texts, which shed light on some of the salient points of Icelandic culture still alive today (baths, horses, sheep transhumance, etc.). Galerie Ísland

Olivier Joly gave an interview to Island.

(1) This uninhabited central part of the country covers 40% of its total territory. It is devoid of vegetation and inaccessible for more than half the year, the few runways being closed due to weather conditions. American astronauts from the Apollo missions trained there between 1965 and 1967 before landing on the Moon.