VOLCANO & EARTHQUAKE EXHIBITION

A world class exhibition on volcanoes and earthquakes surrounded by active volcanoes

The Lava Centre is situated at Hvolsvöllur on the South Coast of Iceland, surrounded by active volcanoes. It truly acts as the gateway to Iceland’s most active volcanic area.

The Lava Centre just received two Red Dot Awards, which cement its position as a world class exhibition.

LAVA Centre is the best place to learn about the new Fagradalsfjall eruption, with new exhibits explaining the eruption and new film footage in the volcano cinema.

Words by Kjartan Þorbjörnsson Photography by Kristján Maack

“While a glacier sleeps, it keeps moving, and it makes quite a ruckus,” Kristján Maack says with a smile. “I’ve spent 30 years on glaciers, but it’s only now, in the dark and the stillness that I notice how noisy they are. When you’re alone in the dark with a small headlamp that you have to turn off when you take pictures, then you hear the creaking and breaking so clearly. The glacier’s practically screaming ‘Get out of here!’”

Kristján has always been big on glaciers. He took a mountaineering course as a kid, and as a teenager he started visiting glacier tongues, going ice climbing, and rappelling into clefts and crevasses. “I did that for 20 years, then I matured and calmed down a bit,” he says, smiling. He usually had his camera with him and took landscape photos for many years, but over time he developed the ability to see in the dark. As a teenager, Kristján joined a search and rescue team and served for decades as a volunteer. Alongside his fellow team members, he often had to climb glaciers to search for lost travellers and save injured people from crevasses. Most of his hobbies are winter-related: ice climbing, skiing, hiking, sleeping in snow huts and tents in the dead of winter. So does he like the cold? “Less and less,” he chuckles.

Recently, Iceland’s glacier tongues have lured this fiftysomething photographer into their embrace, and he meets them armed with his camera, tripod, and flash. He now visits them when it’s cold, still, and completely dark. What he’s searching for are not lost travellers. “It’s very difficult terrain to cross, especially at night in the dark. I try to go when there’s no wind or moonlight, then I light up the ice formations to bring out their many faces and fantasy worlds. All of the light in the photographs is light that I bring to the location, although in a few cases you can see the stars in the background,” Kristján says. He admits that while the subject matter is awe-inspiring, the working conditions are not easy. There are no flat surfaces to place lights on and everything has to be firmly strapped down. “You stand there in crampons and hang on an ice axe with the lights tied to pitons so that they don’t all fall over. Moving a light ten metres over can be a huge bother, with crevasses and walls of ice all around you.” It can be disappointing when he really wants to place a light in a spot he can’t get to. “I’ve been thinking a lot about putting lights on drones and lighting the location from the air, but at the same time I don’t want it to be too technical,” he muses.

Threading across an unfamiliar glacier tongue in the dark is not recommended, and Kristján says he always arrives at the glaciers during the day, scouts promising shooting locations, and waits for dark before he hikes up again to shoot. “You can’t orient yourself in the dark, you don’t see anything.” When he returns at night, he usually finds new and totally different shapes from the ones he planned to

Portrait by Golli Translated by Jelena Ćirić