“Black Iceland”
Throughout this trip to Iceland, I had the feeling of being sucked in the landscape, of seeing a limit and then another one, more distant or more uncertain, of being seized with a kind of horizontal vertigo … Huge waterfalls, rock, frozen lava, landscapes beyond the usual limits, fractured, cracked. All the most violent activities on earth are visible there. The weather is something else. It is a beautiful country but harsh and almost deserted: to travel dozens of kilometers without meeting anyone is not uncommon. A dark monotony sometimes emerges from it and turns into an aesthetic I had never met before. Icelandic houses participate in their own way : very simple, covered with sheet metal, isolated in the middle of the landscape, they are sometimes the only trace of a human presence. This when it manifests, seems lost, as if out of scale.
The choice of black and white allows me here to try to account for this aspect of Iceland, provoking this singular relationship to the space that surrounded me …
Michel Daumergue
