HOW TO UNVEIL A MOUNTAIN

Words by Kjartan Þorbjörnsson HOW

Photography by Brynjar Ágústsson Portrait by Golli

It bothers Brynjar Ágústsson when he drives between Iceland’s natural wonders with a group of photographers and sees them all take the same picture. “It’s so easy to come here and shoot; so many beautiful places all around you. Iceland actually makes it difficult for me to teach my approach to photography because people want to jump on this obvious beauty. But when there’s bad weather, that’s when I have fun, because then you can force people’s minds to see different things.”

Brynjar dives into various pursuits, but he eventually gets bored of them and switches things up. He has studied nutrition, worked as a salesman, taught skydiving, and been a search and rescue volunteer – and he’s always taken photos alongside whatever he’s doing. While his foundation is traditional (he ran a photography studio in Reykjavík alongside other photographers), he got tired of it. “You were just doing portrait photography and shooting city life. I quickly found that I just wanted to be out in nature.” Eight years ago, he started guiding: travelling around the country with a group of photographers. “I’m not teaching people classic postcard photography, I’m totally over that whole thing. I’m teaching them to see differently. How to see, how to observe.”

His life and photography took a U-turn when he went to South America and became familiar with Ayahuasca shamanism, which he has been practising over the last few years. “It changed my life completely. It’s definitely not for everyone, but it was the path for me,” he says, describing the mind-altering methods he discovered in Peru, which opened up a new perspective on life and his environment. Now he sees nature as a many-layered thing: his surroundings are like an onion that he can peel apart. “When you remove one layer, you reveal something new, but it’s still the same onion. Take the mountain Hekla: there are many Heklas. Am I going to experience it the way I saw it last year or ten years ago? Is nature an endless Groundhog Day?”

Repeated visits to the same places have forced him to try to see things differently and find new perspectives. “It happens to all artists. The conditions change, and you shift from how to do something to why you do it. At some point, most artists stop making things for others and instead find the creative force inside themselves and create from there. That’s when I started to see completely new things in the places I’d visited many times before.”

Brynjar says that he used to be very true to the colour palette found in Icelandic nature in his editing, but that’s not the case any longer. “I take a picture, and I see that it’s raw material for something more. It transforms until it’s barely a photograph anymore. Even though it’s always fundamentally nature, it becomes abstract art.” His goal is to trick the mind. “The mind always tries to understand what it sees, but when I create pictures with no size reference points, they become abstract works, patterns and negative space that the eyes and mind experience but can’t necessarily define. Is it a macro photograph or is it taken from an aeroplane?”

He’s photographed a lot from the air, mostly flying with “Volcano Pilot:” Haraldur Diego, who died in a plane accident while on a photography excursion last winter. After his death, Brynjar bought a drone. “Iceland from the air is just texture and pattern,” he says. He also discovered a much bigger world when he started doing macro photography.

Brynjar says he’s not particular about the time of day, time of year, or even the position of the sun when he shoots because he can always find a subject, no matter the conditions. “I don’t care at all, I can always see something. In the harsh noon light, which many photographers hate, I start looking for subjects in the shadows.” He gives an example from a group that he was guiding during the winter in Southeast Iceland, right by Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon. “We had gone to all of the best locations when crazy weather hit and we got stuck at the hotel. That’s when I took the group out into the storm, and we photographed snowdrifts, old houses, snow-covered windows, and all kinds of things around us. At the end of the trip, it wasn’t Jökulsárlón or ice caves that stuck out for them, rather that adventure in the storm.”

In the future, Brynjar plans to stop guiding and exclusively sell his photographs in galleries – there are already a few in the US that sell his work, mostly black and white pictures. “For the first three years after my psychedelic awakening, I was only photographing in black and white.” Brynjar says Ayahuasca has helped him see things in a totally different way. “When I see a picture, I just see energy. My photographs are really all self-portraits. What we see out there is really a reflection of ourselves. I want you to surrender and be drawn into the picture when you look at it. In the end, you see yourself.”

TO UNVEIL A MOUNTAIN