“Landscape is like revelation/it is both singular crystal and the remotest things”
Geoffrey Hill from ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy’
‘The Wilderness Is Yours’ is a photographic exploration of the scale between human and nature as civilization disappears behind the sublime landscapes of Iceland. My thesis being that we, my friends and I at least, are comfortable in the wilderness. We fit. Out there one is left to oneself and each other. To the vast freedom and loneliness of open spaces and the solid stability of movement, step by step. There are no other people. No cellphones. No emails. Nothing but a tremendous and everlasting wilderness that whispers and lures at your every step.
The photographs were made during my second trip to Iceland in 2011. Equipped with the bare necessities my friends and I covered about two hundred kilometers across mountains, glaciers and meltwater rivers in two weeks time. The intention of the series, however, is not to describe the trip, but to evoke a feeling. To call forth the power of the mountain and the whisper of the stream that will lead you into the wilderness.
“Landscape is indeed like revelation: like revelation, landscape draws things together, connects them, allows them to appear; like revelation, landscape also hides things, removes them from view; like revelation, landscape is both singular crystal and the remotest things. Landscape is where we find, and also lose, ourselves.”
Jeff Malpas from “The Place of Landscape”