A SHOT IN

shoot when he scouted the place during the day. “Everything becomes photogenic when darkness falls.”

Kristján’s favourite spots on Iceland’s glacier tongues are not easy to get to, but he likes a challenge. “It’s difficult to reach these spots, maybe a three-hour hike and ice climb just to get to a promising spot. I’ve had to bring assistants, since the glacier and photography equipment that I have to lug around is pretty heavy.”

He often makes trips right up to the glacier’s terminus, where it’s usually calving into a lagoon, though the lagoons are frozen at this time of year. “You have to walk on the frozen lagoon and be careful not to step through the ice. At Sólheimajökull glacier, for example, there’s a lagoon experienced glacier hikers can cross during the day, but at night, you can’t see anything beyond the light of your headlamp and it’s easy to lose your bearings. I mark a path during the day so that I can follow my footsteps back at night.”

Kristján works in absolute darkness. He got bored of shooting classic landscape photos at dusk and dawn and decided to use his experience in studio photography on the glacier – since it’s hard to bring the glacier into the studio. “I’ve worked with lights for the past 20-30 years and I found it fun to combine those two things, glaciers and studio lights.” Though he says it’s only possible for a short window of time every year. “In summer, it’s never dark and I can’t create depth and tease out shapes with the lights. The glacier is also more beautiful when it's frozen. It melts during the summer: the rain makes it wetter. There’s a short window in the late fall, before it starts snowing, because after that the snow blankets everything and fills the crevasses.”

The short period makes for long days: to photograph an evening on Öræfajökull glacier, Kristján embarks on a minimum 14-hour trip. “Then I photograph for about 2-3 hours on the glacier, before my batteries and my energy run out. The good weather often doesn’t last much longer either. Afterwards you have to come down off the glacier and drive home, which takes hours.”

Kristján’s work with glaciers has involuntarily become a climate awareness project. The country’s glaciers have changed dramatically since he started climbing them in 1984. “Entire glaciers have even disappeared. I can barely recognise some places today that I used to know like the back of my hand,” he says, citing Öræfajökull as one example. The landscape there has completely changed. “The glacier tongues on Eyjafjallajökull and Gígjujökull where I started glacier hiking are gone. What’s left are gullies, streams, and a new landscape.” He says these rapid changes are his main motivation for continuing the project. “I want to discover the countless faces of the glaciers, get to know them better before they disappear completely.”

The Dark