In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And there’s this strange thing: you’re never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape.
Hannah kent
But it makes it very beautiful as well.
Iceland Photography: Where Fire Sleeps Beneath Ice
From the airplane window, Iceland first appeared to me like the scaly back of a prehistoric reptile: lava fields for scales, peat instead of skin. A huge pterodactyl asleep in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. It was an image I would never forget.
Reykjavik welcomed me without the majestic haughtiness of a capital city. No skyscrapers, no imposing monuments. Just low houses and streets intersecting at right or acute angles, like any typical northern town. Yet in this city of just over 100,000 inhabitants lives 60% of the entire Icelandic population: 160,000 people out of 300,000 in total. An almost familial intimacy for an entire nation.
The Landscape as Memory
In Iceland I learned that landscape is more than just an objective surface to measure and photograph. It’s much more than that. This is a young land, devoid of historical monuments and ancient ruins. Icelandic historical memory resides in the territory itself: in the traces of volcanic activity, in the secrets of farms mentioned in the sagas and now vanished. The landscape here is deeply historicized—it is history itself.
And this is where extremes truly coexist. Fire and ice: they seem complementary, but in Iceland, they merge. Ice covers fire without extinguishing it, hiding it from human eyes and returning it to nature, multiplied in its transformation into steam and water.
Jökulsárlón: The Lagoon That Shouldn’t Exist
At Jökulsárlón, I witnessed one of the most spectacular consequences of this precarious balance. Between 1973 and 2004, the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier receded by two kilometers. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was only 250 meters from the sea; today it’s three kilometers away.
The retreat uncovered a lake that had remained frozen beneath the ice sheet for centuries. Water laps at the glacier’s terminal tongue and breaks off large pieces—veritable icebergs. They drift in the lagoon, which has grown in size and depth thanks to the influx of meltwater. It’s believed to be Iceland’s second deepest lake: 110 meters at its deepest point, with water at temperatures close to zero.
Hundreds of icebergs of all sizes float in a landscape almost always shrouded in clouds and fog, caused by the condensation of humid air from the sea on the ice. The currents are very weak, and icebergs can remain trapped for years. Just until a particular combination of winds pushes them toward the estuary and warmth reduces them to the right size to slip under the Hringvegur bridge and finally reach the sea.
Jökulsárlón’s new life has lasted seventy years. But it won’t continue much longer. The short river carrying the lagoon’s water to the sea is eroding the surrounding sandur, and waves complete the process on the other side. Sooner or later, the lake will transform into a wide bay from which icebergs will disappear immediately after breaking away from the glacier, swept away by strong sea currents.
Photographing here means capturing something ephemeral, a beauty destined to vanish.
Fjallabak: Behind the Mountains
Fjallabak means “behind the mountains” in Icelandic. This is exactly what I found: a land of deep valleys and barren mountains, inhospitable, harsh, with unpredictable but always cold weather (the average annual temperature is one degree). Yet it’s also Iceland’s second-largest geothermal area and the largest deposit of rhyolite, a volcanic rock that can take on very different appearances depending on how it erupts and the temperature of the surface on which it settles. Pumice is rhyolite, as is black, shiny obsidian.
At the southern end of Eldgjá, when the sun shone, the obsidian sparkled. The colors of that day remain imprinted: the dark grey of the lava, the acid green of the moss, the white of the glaciers, the blue of the sky and water.
Beyond the Landscapes
From the dramatic lava fields of Reynisfjara to the colorful rhyolite mountains of Landmannalaugar, from the steaming geysers of Geysir and Strokkur to the waterfalls of Gullfoss and Seljalandsfoss, Iceland offered me an infinity of photographic subjects. But what I’ll always carry with me isn’t just the captured images.
It’s the sensation of being exposed, always visible in that landscape, as Hannah Kent wrote: “You’re never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape.” A vulnerability that somehow makes everything incredibly beautiful.
This collection is my attempt to share not just the geography of an island, but the experience of having crossed it with a camera in hand and a heart open to wonder.
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Or maybe you just want to see more images of Iceland? My complete gallery is here.
Gorgeous photography of seems to be a stunning country.