Iceland review - 2015, Page 40

38 ICELAND REVIEW
THE
AMBULANCE MAN
I’m a bit like an ambulance driver, always
racing around,” Jón Björgvinsson
says when I meet him for coffee in
Reykjavík in early August. Based out of
Geneva for the past 30 years, he’s on a rare
trip to Iceland. “I don’t get here anywhere
near often enough, unfortunately,” the
61-year-old replies when I comment that
Iceland Review has been trying to catch him
in Iceland for the past three years.
GOING BEYOND WAR AND CONFLICT
Graduating from college in Reykjavík in
1974, Jón began his career at daily news-
paper Vísir, now DV. With dreams of
becoming a journalist and traveling the
world but limited by language in Iceland,
he set off for London where he enrolled in
the London Film School. There he devel-
oped his camera and storytelling skills and
spent his summers filming in Spain. “I was
filming girls in bikinis by the pool in Ibiza,
catalogue stuff,” he says laughing.
After graduation he went on to work for
the media in the UK. “My first war was the
[third] Cod War [1975-76], actually,” he
says with a smirk, referring to the dispute
between the UK and Iceland over terri-
torial waters and fishing rights. “I worked
behind enemy lines in London.” After the
conflict ended, Jón continued to work for
Cameraman Jón Björgvinsson is sometimes referred to as “Iceland’s only war
reporter,” bringing images of the conflict in Syria and elsewhere to television
screens around the world. Zoë Robert met with him to find out more.
international stations. “They didn’t have
post trauma treatment back then so I never
got treated after my first war and just con-
tinued,” he jokes.
Over the past 40 years, Jón has report-
ed extensively from across the globe on
“almost any imaginable subject and several
unimaginable subjects,” as he himself puts
it. Not only have his assignments included
filming women in swimwear for corporate
clients and covering conflicts and disasters
for the major European and US news sta-
tions, like ABC, the BBC and CNN, he has
also been hired by the UN and other devel-
opment and humanitarian organizations in
Africa and worked on nature documenta-
ries for National Geographic. “I traveled
the world for eight years filming eruptions
including Hekla [South Iceland, in 1991],”
he says of his work for French volcanolo-
gist couple Maurice and Katia Krafft, who
tragically died while working on Mount
Unzen, Japan, during an eruption in 1991.
Having landed a position in Reykjavík,
producing and hosting a game show on
Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV, Jón
hadn’t been able to join them on that trip.
“When I finished in the studio that day, I
saw that people had been trying to call me
all day to see if I was all right, to see if I had
been with them or not.”
DANGERS OF THE JOB
Jón was lucky enough to not be on location
in that instance but he’s had many narrow
escapes over the years, including being
taken hostage in Yemen, being attacked by
Mubarak supporters in Egypt, targeted by
snipers in Tunisia, threatened at gunpoint
in Ukraine and regularly been spied upon.
“You develop a sixth sense for people fol-
lowing you,” he says.
Jón has had guns pointed at him so often
it has almost become routine. “When I
was in Ukraine, I had a gun pointed at my
head. ‘Give me all your video cards or I’ll
kill you like a dog!’ the man screamed at
me. I tried to calm him down by saying
that it was a tough call and needed some
reflection: my life or the footage we had
been shooting. But at the same time the
thing that was really worrying me most
was: ‘Where has all my adrenaline gone?
Shouldn’t I at least be trembling?’ There
are so many situations that really look bad
during the moment, but as I often say to my
colleagues: ‘I’ll bet you tomorrow we’ll all
be sitting down together, drinking tea and
exchanging email addresses.’ In this case we
didn’t, but after an hour the situation was
calmer and I got away with both my life
and the cards.”
While he admits he has been in some
PORTRAIT BY PÁLL STEFÁNSSON.
OTHER PHOTOS COURTESY OF JÓN BJÖRGVINSSON.