Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.05.2008, Blaðsíða 46

B14 | Reykjavík Grapevine | Issue 05 2008 | Article
“My pictures are silent descriptions, staging mel-
ancholy, fragility and nobleness of the ordinary
life,” says French photographer Thomas Humery.
On May 16, he will open his first solo exhibition in
Iceland at the National Museum. Entitled ‘In the
Mist’, the exhibition features landscape photos and
portraits, documenting young Icelanders and their
surroundings.
Humery, who has exhibited around Europe
and contributed to various magazines and news-
papers for the past decade, including Libération,
L’Officiel Voyage, Monocle and Glamour, has
worked on the Icelandic photo series for approxi-
mately nine months. He visited Iceland five times
during that period and got locals to pose for a series
that depict young people in their own daily envi-
ronment. Humery says that he is mostly influenced
by 19th century photography, portraitists Ingres
and Verspronck and painters Van der Weyden and
Bronzino. In his portraits, he works with simple set-
tings and lets the expressions on his subjects’ faces
reveal their thoughts and feelings. To tell a story of
the young people’s lives he mixes the portraits with
family-houses, public buildings and outdoor-areas.
Humery’s project began in 2005 when he took
part in a residence program in Finland. “I went dur-
ing the winter and was interested to take pictures
of young people during that tough period of the
year. Nevertheless, this documentary aspect wasn’t
enough. I thought that I should put something more
in my pictures, something more ambiguous and in
a way out of time. I started to compose my portraits
like old paintings from the Dutch period with this
strict protestant aspect. From that point, I was in-
terested to continue this approach between docu-
ments and references in another Nordic context
and in a larger scale,” he explains.
Asked why he chose Iceland for his next
project, Humery says: “From France, Iceland is a
bit mysterious and what is mysterious is of course
very attractive. But more seriously, besides the idea
of young people in the stiffness, where they are pa-
tient during the long winter, turned to their inner
world and rebirth during a fleeting summer, I was
seduced by the fact that the people are very con-
nected to each other and very social. It was pre-
cious for me to meet all these different people and
to be able to produce a large gallery of portraits.”
He continues: “I was attracted to Iceland be-
cause of its isolation and its supposed strong condi-
tions. I was projecting in my mind a lot of images,
feelings and intuitions, wrong or right. So my proj-
ect in Iceland was to produce portraits of young
people with different backgrounds, paraphrasing
the “Portrait of a young man/woman” that we find
as a topic in the history of painting. I have added
with the same approach some landscapes and
views more or less connected to the young people’s
occupations or hang-around places. At the end, my
project is more a personal interpretation of the
Icelandic psyche than a geographic or sociologic
study,” Humery concludes.
The exhibition will be open from May 16 until mid
September.
The National Museum of Iceland
Suðurgata 41
www.natmus.is
By Steinunn Jakobsdóttir
Interpreting the Icelandic Psyche
“I was attracted to Ice-
land because of its iso-
lation and its supposed
strong conditions. I was
projecting in my mind
a lot of images, feelings
and intuitions, wrong or
right. So my project in
Iceland was to produce
portraits of young people
with different back-
grounds, paraphrasing
the “Portrait of a young
man/woman.””