The Long Light

Heimaey is the only inhabited island in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, fifteen kilometers off the southern coast of Iceland. In 1973 a new volcano opened on its eastern edge with no warning, swallowed four hundred houses, and added two square kilometers of land before it stopped six months later. The lava is still warm in places — you can press your hand to the ground in winter and feel the heat coming up through the moss.

I went there in May because that is when the puffin colonies arrive on the cliffs at Stórhöfði and because in May the sun behaves like a slow searchlight. Sunset officially happens around eleven at night and sunrise comes a few hours later, but in between there is no real darkness — only a long, low blue that slides from violet through amber and back again. The whole town runs on that light. People eat dinner at ten. Kids play football at midnight on a green field at the foot of the volcano. The cliffs glow.

I worked the first week at the wrong shutter speeds. Everything I had calibrated for normal sunlight kept under-exposing the shadows. The light here is bright but it is also low — it rakes across the landscape almost horizontally for eight or ten hours at a stretch — and that means the highlights and shadows are doing different things than they would at noon at home. I lost a roll of Portra and a half-roll of Tri-X before I started bracketing seriously.

The Vestmannaeyjar archipelago has been continuously inhabited for over a thousand years. The town of Heimaey itself, which is just called "the town" by everyone who lives there, has about four thousand five hundred people. There is one fish processor, one supermarket, one bakery, and a museum buried half underground that walks you through the 1973 eruption hour by hour. The museum is called Eldheimar — "World of Fire" — and it is built around a single house that the lava reached but did not destroy. You can stand inside the half-buried living room and see the kitchen wallpaper.

By the second week I had stopped trying to force exposures and was metering for the brightest patch of sky and letting the shadows do whatever they wanted. The results were closer to what my eye was actually seeing — a luminous middle ground with deep, plummy darks. I shot a lot more vertically than I usually do. The cliffs on the south side of the island are tall and the puffins nest near the top and the only way to make a frame that included both the cliff and the bird and the long horizontal sea was to turn the camera ninety degrees and let the format do the work.

There is a particular kind of attention that this light demands and it took me most of the first week to find it. You cannot wait for the perfect moment in May in Iceland because every moment is the perfect moment, for a different reason, for about three minutes, and then it changes. You learn to set up before you fully understand the frame and to trust that the next ten minutes will give you something worth keeping. By the end of the second week I was sleeping four hours a night and my film budget was gone and I did not want to leave.

The pictures in this first installment are from the south-facing cliffs and the harbor. The next will be from the new lava field and the houses that were rebuilt at its edge. The full project is being serialized in the quarterly that publishes my long Iceland work; this is the first time any of the frames have appeared anywhere else.

Filed under landscape · part of Iceland: Long Light.