Smoke

Smoke is a personal documentary photographic project about my relationship and feelings for an isolated, sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic. It is a series that was born out of an obsession. Obsession with a place, its people and surroundings. An obsession with Iceland. The first time I landed at Keflavik airport I had never traveled on my own before. Ahead of me was several weeks of emptiness, of unknown. I didn’t know anybody in the entire country, but something happened. I kept coming back, time after time, over the years, obsessively saving up for my trips to Iceland. I kept meeting people, many of them persons in flux, like me, only passing through Reykjavik. At some point I realized that another version of me had taken form: I had created a new identity, a new fixed point in my life. What was once an exhausting challenge became familiar and friendly. Photography is my a tool for understanding my surroundings, but I have never believed in the photograph as a ‘carrier of the truth’. Traditionally, documentary photography has been know to be claiming the truth. In my work, I want to get rid of this idea. Dispose the obligations the tradition of being a documentary photographer comes with. Even though my method is traditional - I never arrange situations, and I shot with black and white 35 mm film. For me, photographs is a raw material, the pictures are small pieces i create my own emotional narrative with. Whether the pictures depict the truth or not, its not important. What’s matters is my relationships and feelings towards people and places. For me it's about understanding the world and exploring myself.