The scale and the limit
The series I present here was born from a journey that became displacement. Iceland has indeed moved me by making me aware that my body, a small dot agitated in a disproportionate space and time, was only momentarily tolerated.
Throughout this trip I had the feeling of being sucked into the landscape, of seeing one limit only to see it slip away in favor of another, more distant or more uncertain. Huge waterfalls, rocks, frozen lava, glaciers, landscapes beyond the limits, fractured, cracked. All the most violent activities on earth are visible there. It is a magnificent but harsh and almost desert country: traveling without meeting anyone is not uncommon. A black monotony sometimes emerges and turns into an aesthetic that I had never encountered.
The omnipresence of the earth in activity, the very changeable weather have reinforced these transitory aspects, these effects of passing from one element or from one state to another made even more present by the fact of being alone most of the time in these desert landscapes, often, sometimes disturbing.
The choice of black and white allowed me to report these aspects of Iceland, provoking this singular relationship to the space that surrounded me… My photos attempt to restore what the discovery of these landscapes, almost free from any human presence which seems lost when it appears, as if out of scale.
Michel Daumergue
