Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.10.2012, Side 34

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The Less You Know About Iceland, The More
Powerful The Experience Is Photographer
Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson interviewed
Why, I ask Sigurgeir, did you start tak-
ing photos?
“It started as a hobby in school,”
Sigurgeir says, “I was taking pictures
of my friends. I was a drummer in a
band and later a manager. I was asked
to take some photos for an album cov-
er and I kind of started a career as a
rock photographer.”
Sigurgeir went on in the world of
photography and studied, first in Ice-
land, then in Stockholm and later in
San Diego. He was one of the local
pioneers of commercial photography
and worked in advertising for many
years, he says. “In Iceland you have
to be very versatile, you can’t focus on
just one kind of photography. When I
was working for the advertising busi-
ness I had to take photos of food, cars,
fashion—everything. We were very
ambitious, if the project was taking
photos of a can of beans, we would do
everything we could to make it good.”
When he’s not pleasing a customer,
however, Sigurgeir says he has more
freedom to do what he feels is right.
“Things won’t turn out well if you’re
always chasing other people’s taste,”
he says.
While he is no longer a rock pho-
tographer, there is a certain music
in his photos. He explains: “There
is music in the photos, but I don’t al-
ways choose what music it is. Differ-
ent kinds of music can control where I
stop my car and go out to take photos. I
think Mahler was composing his Fifth
Symphony when his publisher ap-
proached him, wanting to talk about
the landscape around him. Mahler
answered briefly that he could find all
this landscape in his music.”
LOST IN ICELAND
Sigurgeir is best known for his land-
scape photography today. His book
‘Landscapes,’ published in 1998, was a
breakthrough in local landscape pho-
tography.
“At first I thought landscape pho-
tography was cheap, I looked down on
that kind of photography,” Sigurgeir
says. He was nevertheless commis-
sioned, mostly because of his adver-
tising experience, to take photos for
a calendar for one of Iceland’s biggest
firms. He did that for nine years, and
that’s when his passion for Icelandic
landscape was born.
Following ‘Landscapes,’ he pub-
lished his most famous book, ‘Lost
In Iceland,’ which radically changed
the way Iceland was promoted abroad.
“It was unheard of to promote Iceland
with a dark photo full of rain! I think
I’m getting closer to the experience
of tourists visiting Iceland. We must
not get over-touristic. People come
to Iceland to get to know themselves
through Iceland and the circumstanc-
es are often challenging.”
Sigurgeir says this experi-
ence is changing. “I remember
when I first came to Dettifoss
waterfall. You had to walk nar-
row paths to get close to it and
it somehow helped you experi-
ence the greatness. It’s a different
experience now when you drive a
paved road all the way down,” he says.
“I have travelled a lot and one thing
that makes Iceland so special is that
you don’t have to drive for hours be-
fore you see the next spectacular place.
It has a special dimension, a unique
horizon and diversity you learn to ap-
preciate when you travel in parts of the
world.”
This is a quality that he says we
must not lose. “Icelandic tourism is
quite greedy at the moment. I can’t
imagine the experience of travelling
around Iceland in a bus for ten days
listening to a guide talking all day
in the speakers, telling you how Ice-
land is. You don’t have to tell people
anything about Iceland. Iceland is an
experience that happens. The less you
know about Iceland, the more power-
ful the experience is.”
WHO ARE ICELANDERS?
In 2004, Sigurgeir teamed up with
writer Unnur Jökulsdóttir to make the
wonderful portrait book, ‘Icelanders.’
In this book, Sigurgeir and Unnur
documented lives and opinions of Ice-
landers all around Iceland.
“Many people were surprised that
we were going around Iceland taking
photographs and interviewing people
that they thought were odd,” Sigurgeir
says. “We didn’t find the people odd;
they were really close to nature and
maybe a little eccentric. It was remark-
able, the strong opinions that many of
the people we met had. They weren’t
holding their thoughts back.”
“This was a book that was quite a
surprise for many people, including
our publishers,” Sigurgeir says and
smiles. Originally 4000 copies of the
book were printed, but 25,000 copies
have since been sold.
IT’S A SMALL WORLD
Most recently, Sigurgeir published
a book he calls ‘Iceland—A Small
World,’ which is quite literally small.
In fact, it fits easily in your pocket. He
came up with the title after visiting
Disney World and hearing the “It’s A
Small World” song.
And in some ways, he says, Iceland
is like being in another world, like
Disney World in another dimension.
“This is how I experience Iceland.
I think Iceland is a world of its own.
You can see so many elements in this
small world,” he says.
“I tried to fill the book with photos
to match what I was thinking. It was
when I found this photo of a house in
Hofsós, a house my wife told me to
photograph, that everything clicked.
It’s a happy and unusual photo that
shows independent people, two fami-
lies living in one house, and they don’t
imitate each other; they keep their
own style. This photo fits the title per-
fectly, as it could be a doll-house.”
You could say that the book has
grown though, because Sigurgeir has
since then also published a larger ver-
sion. “I must admit that I wanted to
see the photos in a bigger book,” Sig-
urgeir says. “It has come as a surprise
that many people actually buy both
versions.”
Back to the studio. It is in an old
house in the centre of Reykjavík. The
walls show some of the highlights
from Sigurgeir’s career. We talk about
the photographer’s point of view.
“A photo freezes the moment,
stops the time, and all of a sudden you
have taken the picture out of a bigger
context,” Sigurgeir says. “No photo is
really true. You just see what the pho-
tographer wanted you to see. There is
a photo by Diane Arbus of a little boy
with a hand grenade in his hands and
he’s terrified. I have seen all twelve
photos from this sequence and the
other photos don’t say anything,
they’re lifeless. There is just this one
photo that shows this deep feeling that
is so magnificently powerful.”
- SIGTRYGGUR MAGNASON
Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson is one of Iceland’s
best photographers, acclaimed for his
unique pictures of Iceland and Icelanders. I sat
down with him in his studio in downtown Reykjavík. It’s
beginning to smell of autumn and the leaves are starting
to shiver on their branches, never forgetting their cruel
fate. But forget the leaves, remember the photographs.
34 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 16 — 2012PHOTOGRAPHY You can buy these books at any bookstore in Reykjavík, and online at forlagid.is
INTER
VIEW
Alísa Kalyanova
“
When you’re not
thinking about pleas-
ing a customer, you’re
only doing what you think
is right. If you’re always
chasing other people’s
taste, it will become a
bad mixture.„
Horses (2008)
Lost in Argentina (2011)
Lost in Iceland (2002)
Iceland - small world (2012)