Reynir Ragnarsson, 80, pilot. Has been flying for 60 years, has always been in private aviation, sometimes worked for medical aviation taking patients from the South coast to a hospital in Reykjavik. Has mainly flown smaller planes and has a reputation of the best expert in them in the whole country. His plane, called Friðrik Alfred Ragnar, is 46 years old. Once or twice a week, depending on the weather, Reynir flies to inspect and take pictures of volcanoes. At the take-off he says into his radio: ‘Here is Friðrik Alfred Ragnar. We are taking off.’ Reynir is in charge of two volcanoes: Katla and Eyjafjallajökull. The state pays him reasonable wages for the volcano observation data and the pictures that he sends to a special volcano-monitoring office in Reykjavík. Friðerik Alfred Ragnar lives in a hangar in a solitary place some 12 kilometers away from Vík. Reynir drives to him past beautiful fields of blue lupine. The front wall of the hangar is closed with a multitude of bolts and locks. Reynir opens them all, then grabs Friðrik Alfred Ragnar by the tail and drags him out of his den. In all airports of the world that task is normally performed by a special towing vehicle, but Reynir is so strong he can do it himself. Apart from volcano observations, Reynir has a few other jobs: for example, he takes samples of water in the nearest rivers, analyses them with special metering equipment and sends data to the central lab. If the level of some substances such as sulfur is high, an eruption can be expected in the place where the river comes from. All that work allows him to have an enjoyable lifestyle, keep and maintain the plane and feel that the community needs and loves him. Besides, he is a grandfather and great-grandfather to a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I took his picture on Thursday, June 19th 2014. It was towards 7 p.m., the weather was calm but not quite good for flying because of low clouds. As I touched Friðrik Alfred Ragnar and stroked him with my hand with an awe-related feeling I realized for the first time how much alive an inanimate object can be.
Susanna Potrykus, 8 y.o. From a family of Polish emigrants, has lived in Iceland for five years. She has two elder brothers, one younger brother and a little baby sister. Her mother works in a bank and at the post-office, and her father is a carpenter. Quite recently he opened his own business. Susanna loves the place she lives in, village called Þórshöfn. She is friends with all the children at school, speaks fluent Icelandic, Polish and some English. Her house stands close to the ocean, just like all the houses in Þórshöfn. Almost every day she spends some time on the shore: gathering stones, seaweed, bits of driftwood washed ashore. From them she makes her art: garlands, small sculptures, assemblages, installations. And writes wonderful stories of imagination. When her family was leaving Poland, her grandmother was already dead, that’s why the grandmother traveled to Iceland as an old photograph in a frame and one of her most precious possessions, a tiny wristwatch, also in a nice wooden frame. In the photo the grandmother looks a little like Marlene Dietrich and has a similar hair style. She is smiling happily out of the frame as if back in the 1960s she already knew about her descendants’ happy future. Susanna and I met on Saturday, January 26th when her parents agreed to take me free of charge in their overloaded car from Reykjavik to Þórshöfn. The wind was really a squall, there was a snow blizzard at the same time and almost zero visibility. When we arrived in Þórshöfn who days later Susanna’s father who had been driving the whole way confessed that he only has one eye! He had lost the other one in construction accident.
Kristinn Nikulásson, 54, mechanic from Kópavogur, one of Reykjavík’s major suburbs. In summer he spends a lot of time on Flatey island where he has a summerhouse. There is a huge difference between a normal summerhouse and a summerhouse in Flatey island. Usually a summerhouse is something with a light structure, maybe even without serious heating facilities, where you can spend time from June till August. But the summerhouses on Flatey island are different: they are mainly former village houses, robustly built - quite long ago - most of them date back to the 19th century, where people lived all year round while there was a lot of herring in the Breðafjördður bay. There are a total of 2700 large and small islands in the bay. Only some 100 years ago their population was over 4000 people. And now there are just 4 people living there permanently. Everyone else is a ‘summer person’ from Reykjavík and its surroundings. All the houses on Flatey have names: ‘The Baker’s House’, ’The Doctor’s House’, ‘The Teacher’s House’, ‘The House on the Cliff’. Kristinn’s house is called ‘The House on the Cliff’, it was built in 1871. And his Fergusson tractor was made in 1958. Kristinn fixed it with his own hands and is very proud of it. We met on Flatey quite close to his house where he was driving his tractor: there are no cars in Flatey (on grounds of bird protection) but almost every serious holidaymaker has a tractor. It was Saturday, June 5th 2014, it was getting close to 4 p.m. The weather was very cold, with a strong wind blowing.
Eysteinn Björn Haberg, 13 y.o., Salóme Pálsdóttir, 12, Björt Inga Vignisdóttir, 13, Bryndis Kristjansdóttir, 13, Dagur Eggertsson, 12. They are the children that I met near Valdís ice-cream shop in the docks on Tuesday, June 3rd 2014. And they gladly agreed to be photographed. It was the last or the last-but-one school day before summer holidays. The shop was full of children, they were all celebrating the beginning of summer. The weather was sunny and almost warm. It was around 4 p.m.
Óttar Sigurðsson, 54 (centre), Óddur Hallgrimsson, 54 (left) and Ásgeir Valur Flosason, 34, firemen. We met at the Valdís ice-cream shop in the docks that is only known to the locals, but is, in spite of that, always full of customers. There is a really huge variety of tastes - maybe 40 or closer to 50, and it is always crammed with kids and pregnant women with prams. It was a little surprising to see 3 firemen, in the uniform and with distinction signs, with child-life enthusiasm walk out of the shop and sit down on the bench to enjoy the newly bought cones heavily loaded with ice-cream.
They said that their shift lasts for 12 hours, 7 days a week. Three stripes on the shoulder pieces mean over 10 years of service. Firemen in Iceland are a multi profile job: you need to be a policeman, a doctor and superman all in one. Luckily, fires only happen very rarely: less and less people tend to smoke in bed, and the electricians here are the best in the world. The weather was very warm and sunny, without wind, it was around 4 p.m., Wednesday, June 3rd 2014.
They said that their shift lasts for 12 hours, 7 days a week. Three stripes on the shoulder pieces mean over 10 years of service. Firemen in Iceland are a multi profile job: you need to be a policeman, a doctor and superman all in one. Luckily, fires only happen very rarely: less and less people tend to smoke in bed, and the electricians here are the best in the world. The weather was very warm and sunny, without wind, it was around 4 p.m., Wednesday, June 3rd 2014.
Emilía Rán Emilsdóttir, 6, from Reykjavík. We met on June 5th 2014 in Laugavegur, near Gotta boutique. Emilía’s mother was doing her business in the shop, while Emilía herself was busy with her scooter. It was raining, the weather was nasty. Emilía’s mother said that her daughter loves to pose for pictures and be the object of everyone’s attention. It was pretty obvious: from the very first minute of our meeting Emilía was so relaxed and natural, it left me with no doubts about the fact that this child is completely happy with herself and life in general.
Jón Hólm Hafsteinnsson, 46 y.o., works as a docker in the port of Siglufjörður, downloads fish containers from in-coming ships early in the morning and uploads processed and frozen fish in ice boxes onto huge refrigerator ships in early afternoon. The first time I saw Jón was before sunrise, maybe 7.30 a.m., in the morning dusk he was throwing fish of the unknown to me kind from one container into the other standing on scales. Steam was coming up from both the man and the fish. There was a moment when he picked up a particularly big, spotted fish with a lot of teeth in its mouth and and almost thrust it into my face the way an adult would do to a child to scare it. I took this portrait picture of Jón later in the afternoon when his work day was almost over. It was one o’clock, the weather was calm, but frosty. Jón confessed that he doesn’t have a computer or email address. So when this picture was published in a magazine I had to send it with regular snail mail. I hope he liked it. The fish in the photograph was carefully selected by himself - it was one of the biggest cods from the morning catch.
Dagbjört Bírgisdóttir, 20, from Borgarnes. We met at around 1 p.m. on Thursday, June 3rd 2014, when I walked into cafe Narfeyrarstofa in Skykkishólmur where she works as a waitress. The weather was really terrible, with gusts of wind, rain and cold (+8 C). I was waiting for the ferry to go to Flatey island. The ferry goes twice a day in any weather. So I had three hours to kill in Skykkishólmur, which was not easy because there was absolutely nowhere to go there to find shelter from the elements. Having left my sleeping bag, suitcase and tripod at the ferry station I went walking about the town. Walking meant struggling against the wind, bending forward at 90 degrees, with the body almost parallel to the ground. In Skykkishólmur there is a modernist church - a very open-minded architectural fantasy. This is something I like Icelandic churches for: almost anything is allowed - from strange architecture to gay weddings and easy-going religious paintings with a Madonna resembling an androgynous alien floating in an ultramarine cloud more than anything. After visiting the church I sent myself to the local library that doesn’t have a single book but a collection of the Icelandic glacial water (from every glacier around the country). The water is placed inside floor-to-ceiling glass columns. The installation is called the Water Library. After that I came to the cafe where Dagbjört works. It looked more like a palace or at least an aristocratic manor, with antique furniture, old china, lace and portraits of the Danish royal family on the walls (in its early days Stykkishólmur was the biggest Danish community in Iceland).
Dagbjört said that the waitressing was just a summer job and that she intended to start university in the autumn. Her biggest dream is to become a primary school teacher. She loves kids, she said.
Dagbjört said that the waitressing was just a summer job and that she intended to start university in the autumn. Her biggest dream is to become a primary school teacher. She loves kids, she said.
Guðný and Siggi: Guðrun Marta Gunnarsdóttir, 61, and Sigurður Sigfusson, 72, from Þórshöfn. She used to work in the fish factory, he is a long-distance truck driver, now retired. Siggi is a genius accordion player. When he takes his instrument out and sits down on his terrace to play, the few passers-by (because Þórshöfn is a very small place) stop to listen and applaud, and yell encouragements from the street. While Guðný is singing. The duet performs Icelandic folk songs as well as Siggi’s own music. The accordion can be considered a traditional Icelandic instrument. It is not know for sure when it appeared in Iceland but I have at different times heard very old recordings dating back to the early 20th century. The music that Guðný and Siggi play is rather joyful, with a fast tempo: it has something in common with the Breton, Scottish and Irish music, it is very danceable. It’s a pity I don’t understand much about music because I feel like finding an appropriate and harmonious word to describe it, but anything that comes to my mind now is too crude and ignorant, so very sublime is the music. One or two songs performed by Guðný and Siggi during an hour’s concert were sad. They had a daughter but she died: her car slid off a cliff in the fog a few years ago. They mourn her loss and cherish her memory: their living-room is full of pictures that Guðný showed and described to me very thoroughly, and with pride. She also showed her own pictures as a girl: she had 13 sisters and 2 brothers. Guðný and Siggi have two sons. One of them was to visit them that day, so Guðný was boiling two sheep heads in preparation for a family reunion. It was Thursday, June 26th 2014, the weather was warm and windless, it was around 3 p.m.
Alvin Möller, 11 y.o., Hugbjört Möller, 7 y.o., and their dog Grímur. I met their parents and did a family portrait on their farm Ytra Lón in summer 2007. Alvin was six at the time and Hugbjört about two. At the end of January 2013 I revisited Langanes peninsula and their farm, the north-easternmost farm in Iceland. The kids have grown: Hugbjört learnt to incubate eggs and grow chickens, knit, make fried eggs and developed an interest for fashion design. And Alvin now plays football and writes books on magic rituals. This photo was taken on January 30th, 2013, in the midst of a snowstorm.
