EYE FOR AN ISLAND

from Iceland Review - June / July 2022

ERRÓ: REMEMBRANCES OF A TITAN

Words by Kjartan Þorbjörnsson Portrait by Golli

Oscar Bjarnason was born and raised in the Faroe Islands but moved to Iceland as a teenager. Still, it wasn’t until he grew into an adult and started taking pictures of the landscape that he truly saw the natural wonders that had surrounded him his whole life. He lives on the outskirts of Reykjavík, but often drives the wrong way to work. “Instead of spending 20 minutes stuck in traffic, I take the longer route. I always find something that makes me stop and pull out my camera or drone. I keep my camera in my work bag, or hanging around my neck. I feel naked without it,” Oscar says, adding that he usually keeps a pair of rubber boots in the car, too. “Sometimes you have to wade out into the water to get the best angle.”

Oscar never planned on working in photography. “At first, I wanted to become a goldsmith or architect, but somehow I ended up in technical drawing. On my wanderings at the school job fair, I saw the software that printing houses were using and switched over to that, but then it turned out to be incredibly boring,” he says, laughing. His computer skills and keen eye eventually got him a job at an advertising agency, and then he was headhunted from one to the next. “I was mostly masking pictures in ads to begin with, probably the closest thing to sweeping the floors in the advertising industry,” Oscar jokes. “Something you can do now with the click of a mouse.”

He’s worked in many of Iceland’s biggest advertising agencies as a designer, photo editor, and layout artist, along with becoming one of the country’s best logo designers. So what does a good logo need? “It has to be simple and memorable,” Oscar says, and he goes by the same rule in photography: “KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. Which is not always easy.”

While Oscar enjoys landscape photography, he says it’s not his favourite. “What I love most is wandering around a big city and shooting everything around me. Iceland doesn’t really offer that. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.” He does love photographing solo in the Icelandic highland, too, but finds the summer a challenging time. “The best lighting is during the bright summer nights, but then when you have to take care of the kids the next day, you’re exhausted. That’s why I take most of my landscape photos in the spring and fall.”

Oscar tries to go to the Faroe Islands every couple of years, and recently the main pull has been Icelandic friends who want to visit and bring a local with them. He says most of the people who he has taken to the Faroes have fallen for the country and its people. “Most of them want to go back again – though one photographer was pretty peeved when we got stuck in fog for a week. Then everything is humid and almost black and white.”

So what’s the main difference between Iceland and the Faroe Islands? “The distances. Everything is smaller in the Faroes – you can get anywhere in an hour’s drive,” Oscar says, though Suðuroy island, a definite must-see, is only accessible by boat. “It’s all so charmingly small and relaxed.” The landscapes are similar to Iceland’s Westfjords: steep slopes and very little lowland. “Most of the mountains end in the sea.” Oscar says the roads are good and, unlike in Iceland, you don’t need a jeep for the mountain routes.

Then there’s the Faroese scenery: photo-ops wherever you look. “The clouds often gather around the mountains and a very beautiful light filters through them, which creates dramatic and fantastical scenes that change every fifteen minutes. Of course, when I was a kid there, I didn’t see it the way I do now. After I took up photography, I started seeing my environment in a whole new way. I almost feel like a tourist when I go to the Faroe Islands now.” The feeling is magnified by the fact it always takes Oscar some time to get used to speaking Faroese again. “Switching between Icelandic and English is no problem, but Faroese and Icelandic are so similar. Some words are the same, others are identical but have different meanings, so you get mixed up the first few days. The last few times I’ve gone, I’ve prepared myself by listening to Faroese music. Then it seeps into my consciousness before I’m there.”

Since he always has his camera ready, Oscar’s photo collection grows quickly, and he uploads many of his shots to online photo banks, where he sometimes makes a pretty penny. One of his snapshots even paid for a whole trip abroad for the family. “We were in the old town of Lyon, in France, and my daughter was spinning in circles and dancing. I snapped a photo, and later a big European investment firm bought an exclusive licence to it for a whole year.” He can never guess which pictures will sell best. “The ones that I have sold the most copies of are a picture of a lighthouse on Mykines island, in the Faroes – not a great picture by any means,” he says critically. “The lighting was very harsh when I took it, but it sold regularly over the next three years and that one shot ended up paying for the entire trip to the Faroes. Then there’s a picture I took of a row of flags outside Reykjavík City Hall during the Pride Festival: that picture’s been bought a few hundred times.”