Snap

Þorskafjarðarheiði

2011-09-04T10:57:00.000Z

Þorskafjarðarheiði is a place where I spent a couple of hours this summer and took a few pictures. I was there with friends for a reason I can´t really tell (it was in no way illegal or negative). It is a heath by a mountain gravel road that lies between fjords in the Western Fjords region of Iceland. Better roads have been made in other places, resulting in very little traffic on this road. The only man made structures visible are the road itself, a rescue hut for those stranded in bad weather and a distant telegraphic mast. The landscape is best described by the pictures, it is rocky with a few small lakes. Vegetation is sparse and of a hardy kind, moss and small flowering plants.

Nobody comes here, there is nothing special to see, it is just an obstacle to be traversed. The only sounds are the constant wind in your ears and the incessant beeping of the plovers following you around, dutifully warning their kind of the intrusion. From the window of the car this looks like a desert but as soon you step out of the car you see that the place is filled with life of a special kind, even the stones are covered with lichen, drawing feeble nourishment from the sun.

This kind of landscape gets no love, neither from the locals who see no use in this land and no beauty as they drive past, nor from the ever increasing number of tourists who like things more spectacular. It is not protected in any way and it probably doesn´t need to be, there is no reason to build anything here, there are no rivers to dam or anything to mine. Long after the rest of the land will be parceled off and used for industry or agriculture or in some cases protected as national parks where tourists are led through on well marked paths, this will remain.

Old man standing

2010-11-07T12:30:00.003Z

Some subjects seem to crop up again and again in my photos without me being conscious of seeking these out. I was looking through my Barcelona pictures and one subject that got repeated was pictures of old men standing alone. I also have pictures of old men walking but these are fewer. What is about this that draws me? There is something sad in these pictures, why are they alone and why are they standing like that? Perhaps they are waiting for their wives or children or friends but sometimes it seems they are just standing there without purpose. These pictures are often not very exciting and they elicit little response when I show them. The compositions are static and centralized. Is this the way I see myself in thirty years, standing alone in a city, waiting for something to happen? I don´t know but there you are.

Adventures in Holga

2010-10-31T15:55:00.003Z

I got myself a Holga the other day. It was one of those why not purchases. I´ve been meaning to get into medium format one of these day and since the Holga costs next to nothing it seemed a good way to start. It´s a also a nice way to get away from the complications of photography. There´s little you can do to affect the outcome, you just load up the film, choose either the sun or the cloud in the way of exposure and approximate the focus by turning the lens toward one guy, three guys, seven guys or a mountain. Not that there is much in the way of focus anyway. So in that way it´s like a point and shoot with the exception that the point and shoot has a computer brain and does a lot of thinking for you, while the Holga has no brain at all. So all you can do is remember to take off the lens cap, point in the approximate direction of the subject, press the shutter and hope for the best. The Holga gives a very specific look, vaguely sharp in the center with blur and vignetting at the edges. It´s a bit of a novelty thing of course and I wouldn´t use it for everything but it´s a fun little contraption. Some examples:

The line road

2010-10-25T17:30:00.002Z

Yesterday I went on an all too rare nature expedition. It was a perfect late fall/early winter day, clear and bright. A bit too perfect for photographic purposes, not a cloud to be seen and a pretty flat light which accentuates the rather monotonous colors of this time of year. I´m in a totally different mode on these trips than when I´m doing street work. I bring a lot of gear and shoot mostly digital with all the different lenses at my disposal. I tweak the pictures quite a bit in Lightroom but I don´t do any major Photoshop surgery. I´m fortunate in having a friend who shares my photographic interests and has a heavy duty 4WD as well. We drove on a rough track that follows some major electric lines. All in all a perfect day and here are some of the results.

Barcelona Garbage

2010-10-23T16:53:00.003Z

Barcelona is a surprisingly neat city and it takes an army to keep it that way. Everywhere there are people sweeping, picking up, scrubbing and spraying. So this post isn´t about the garbage lying around randomly. It´s about the garbage in limbo, having been arranged but awaiting it´s final destination, be it a landfill, recycling, incineration or some other fate unknown to me. So at this stage it´s still garbage but it´s neat garbage and it takes on a new life, making for unexpected patterns and color combination. Sometimes it takes on the shape of a mysterious animal, more often it looks like installation art. Often it catches the light of the narrow alleys in interesting ways. I found myself taking quite a few garbage pictures, here are some examples.

Barcelona

2010-08-28T16:39:00.003Z

I spent two weeks in Barcelona in August. I was there with family, the schedule was pretty loose and I was free to shoot pretty much as I wanted. I couldn´t quite go off on a tangent so I spent most of the time in the center where all the tourists are. Shot a couple of hundred digital photos which were mostly crap and about twelve rolls of film with a 2:1 ratio of b&w to color. I´m pretty happy with the film shots, it´s a mix of street action with some more quiet pictures focusing on light and color. I didn´t have the problems with exposure that I had on my New York trip earlier this year. I´ve learned to err on the side of overexposure at the cost of speed and/or depth of field. Even in the labyrinths of the Barrio Gotico I was getting pretty decent exposures.

The city was very crowded with tourists and predictably many of the pictures are of tourists and the things they get up to, with a slight ironic twist. What was interesting to me in the midst of this touristic onslaught was the amount of old locals going about their business or even just sitting on a bench and watching life go by. Consequently I have my share of little old ladies/gentlemen shots. All in all I feel that my photos reflect pretty well my impression of the city which is pretty much all I can ask for from a tourist visit.

One thing I´ve been thinking pretty hard about after looking through my photos is the b&w vs. color question. I´m leaning towards focusing exclusively on color, although I have a hard time giving up b&w entirely. The best thing would be to get a second body but then I have to decide between getting a second Leica or perhaps going to medium format which is a dream I´ve been having. Decisions, decisions....

2010-07-15T12:29:00.002Z

The weather is different these days. I remember summers here as cold and wet and windy with occasional nice days. This summer and the past few ones have been nice, warm and sunny and dry and not so windy. This seems like a positive development but inevitably one begins to think about global warming and looming catastrophe. People are fishing mackerel off the piers, this hasn´t happened before.

Rain

2010-07-13T16:31:00.002Z

It´s raining in Reykjavík but it´s a calm and pretty rain. It´s a day when nothing important happens, one hopes. A day for nodding off while not really listening to jazz. A day to start reading a big book, not thinking about the seven unfinished ones.

July, 12th

2010-07-12T22:19:00.004Z

A day of waiting. Smelly fish and paperwork. Redfaced baristas in the heat, weeds growing in the cracks of the city. Akvavit and meatballs, a metal chair in sunlight. Grey old men smoking in the shade.

New Orleans

2010-06-12T11:46:00.005Z

It´s been a long time since I wrote my last post. During that time I´ve been to New York and New Orleans, I´ve taken on more work and I´ve had less time to devote to photography. The two trips to America were very different. The first one to New York I did on my own, I stayed in a cheap hotel and walked the streets all day. It was done with the sole purpose of diving into photography so basically all I did was take photos and look at photography, in museums and galleries. It was my first real stay in New York and I really loved it, the energy of the place is unbelievable. The museums were great but I hated the Chelsea galleries. They´re located in the most boring part of Manhattan and they´re really cold and nasty places. The photos I took in New York were something of a disappointment. The digital shots were kind of all over the place, uncomposed and uninteresting. The film shots were a little more structured but suffered from technical problems, I was frequently underexposing in the canyons of the city. So I basically got some decent shots but very few photos that I would consider among my best.

The trip to New Orleans was very different. It was a tightly structured conference trip, staying in a nice hotel, invited to fine dinners in the evening. There was really little time to devote to photography, an hour here and two hours there. I really fell in love with the place, even though it is intensely touristic and something of a mess. It is definitely a place to go back to. The ratio of effort vs. result was much better this time around, although in the grand scheme of things I probably didn´t add too much to the canon of New Orleans photography.

But the best thing about going away like this to different places, looking intensely, is the coming back and seeing your own surroundings in a slightly different light. Both of these trips were followed by brief but valuable bursts of creativity on the home front.

The harbor

2010-02-15T17:03:00.003Z

I find myself returning to the old harbor time and again during my city wanderings. It lies right by the city center. It has long ago ceased to be the main harbor, all cargo is handled in another much more modern and efficient place. The old harbor is slowly being converted from a working place to a tourist attraction. The smaller cruise ships come to harbor here, this is where all the whale watching tours set off and of course it is the site of the grand new concert hall. Around the harbor, old workshops are being torn down and luxury apartments and offices built instead. The current crisis has slowed things down but that is but a temporary respite. There are still working enterprises here, a shipyard, fish processing and even the whaling boats dock here though they land their catch elsewhere.

But the process is inevitable. Once the luxury apartments and hotels and restaurants get built the rest will become nuisance because a working harbor is a smelly and dangerous and often ugly place. Rusty boats slowly sinking into the sea, their owners cannot be found or are long since bankrupt. Wooden piers rot slowly without maintenance, a hazard to children. The paint sprayed on the boats in the shipyard can, if the wind is right, damage the cars that are parked in the vicinity. So the harbor becomes something else, a sight, a sanitized experience, a picturesque vista best enjoyed from a penthouse behind glass.

Despite my frequent wanderings here, the good light, the juxtapositions and change ongoing I do not have many successful images from the harbor. A little here and a little there. I must do better.

Blindness

2010-02-14T18:31:00.003Z

I feel as if I´ve been struck blind. Three times this week I´ve walked the town for an hour or two and hardly taken a single picture. I don´t see anything. It may be because I´ve been walking the same street for years now. For the last two or three months I´ve been able to blame the lack of light, the weather, being busy. But now I´ve got plenty of time, the weather´s been fine, the days are getting longer and still I walk without seeing. I know I need direction, purpose, goal but that hasn´t stopped me before. Maybe this town has yielded all that it's got to give but I hardly think so either. I think it´s simple boredom, I need a change, a break in the routine, new vistas, if only to see the old ones with fresh eyes. At least I hope so because that´s what I´m going to do, going to New York for a week with no particular goal other than to walk fresh streets. I will of course bring a camera, take lots of pictures but I hold no high hopes that they will be great. I don´t know the city, I´ll be a tourist, getting a first look at the things I´ll see.

Two vievs of Cuba

2010-01-30T12:43:00.002Z

I recently got two photobooks dealing with Cuba in very different ways.

One is "Havana" by David Bailey and the other one is "Violet Isle" by Alex Webb and his wife Rebecca Norris Webb. It´s very interesting to compare these two books, the different approach and vision and the very different outcome.

Havana by David Bailey.

David Bailey is of course as well known as a photographer can get, the role model for the main character in "Blow up", photographer of rock stars and celebrities. He himself explains in the foreword that his is a superficial glance at Cuba, that his real dream has been to photograph Fidel Castro but that he has never been able to. Normally this sort of book wouldn´t appeal to much but it´s hard to resist a sumptuous Steidl first edition at 50% off.

The stylistic aproach is somewhat scattered with a mixture of color and b&w, different formats, some street photography and a lot of portraits. The quality of the photos is uniformly excellent and the printing is gorgeous. I do like the color photos better, they are incredibly vibrant without being garish. There is no technical information but it looks like everything is taken on film and the photographer thanks Olympus at the end.

It sounds as if I like this book a lot, but I really don´t. The reason is the superficial approach, never challenging any of the ideas we already have about Cuba. Cuba seems to be a beautiful colorful place, the people poor but charming and content. Their clothes are worn but stylish and they have big cigars and a big grin. Nowhere do we get to look under the surface. We also get the obligatory shots of the great old American cars cruising the streets. I´m not saying this picture is wrong, but I´m sure there is more to Cuba than this.

Violet Isle by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

In this book the approach is very different. A collaborative effort by two photograpers who happen to be married. This is definitely a deeper look at Cuba, the result of several journeys over a period of more than ten years. All of it is in color, Alex Webb being a lifelong Kodachrome devotee. I don´t know what film his wife uses but it might very well be Kodachrome as well. The book is a softcover, enclosed in a cardboard sleeve, inspired by a Cuban producer of handmade books. A lot of the pictures are printed across the gutter, thus achieving a bigger size at the cost of cutting the picture in two. The quality of the printing is excellent, fully exploiting the glorious color of the photos.

I like this book a lot more, although it is more "difficult". The mood is quite different, although the beauty and dignity of the people is obvious there is a feeling of confinement, idleness and unfulfilled longing.

Rebeccas picture deal with animals of all kinds. Cats and birds and fishes, living, painted, stuffed and made of stone. I think the quality of her photos is somewhat uneven but the best ones are very strong, particular standaouts being a picture of two silver fishes in an aquarium window, surrounded by a bright blue wall and another one two fighting cocks, tied down in a courtyard.

Alex's pictures are more traditional street photography and very consistent with his established style of shooting, building very complex photos, using all the possible ingredients, people in movement, colors, shadows, reflections. He shoots through cars, downwards and upwards. I sometimes feel that he takes his game too far, achieving complexity for it´s own sake. I can also feel that he´s in danger of repeating himself, some of the photos in this book are very similar to pictures in his Istanbul book. I like it when he slows down a bit and allows himself to take quiet pictures, like his photo of an empty chess club, with a photo of Castro above a chess table, lifting an admonishing finger and a notice nearby, saying "silencio". But on the whole, his pictures are excellent and if one enjoys street photogrphy one has to love his stuff.

In summary, very different views of the same place, resulting in very different books. Both are very good in different ways but I feel that the Webb´s approach, taking their time, looking under the surface and avoiding the obvious picture results in much stronger work.

Lee Friedlander Photographs Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes - a review

2010-01-17T21:53:00.002Z

I´m trying to keep up to date with the photobooks I´ve been acquiring lately. Yesterday I bit the bullet and forked out some cash for this Friedlander. I´ve been looking at this book for a while but it was pretty expensive. I thought that maybe it would go on sale after the holidays but that wasn´t the case and there was only one example left so it was now or never. It is a Friedlander first edition, beautifully produced so it should maintain it´s value. I also managed to get 20% off so I´m quite happy.

To the book now. It is the result of a commission to photograph parks and squares designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. He designed several such in the 19th century, the most famous being Central Park in New York. Most of the work is done between 1989 and 1994 although the oldest picture is from 1977 and the latest one from 2006. All of it is black and white of course, done in different formats. Much of it done on his trusted Leica but another big part on the Hasselblad superwide as well as some panoramic pictures. This project coincided with his exploration of the American West and he uses a lot of the same techniques here.

The quality of the book is top notch, bound in olive brown cloth with a photograph on the cover. As far as I can judge the printing is excellent. As to the content, it is hard to say anything other than this is the work of a true master. Anyone who has seen his landscape work will be familiar with the style, he tends to fill the frame with foreground so what for other people would be the main subject, a lake, a bridge or a stately dome can barely be glimpsed behind a network of leaves, branches and straw. It is a unique style, one that is sure to irritate a lot of people who just want a pretty picture. But if you´re into his game, this is a tour de force.

In summary, this is a beautifully produced book of photos by an absolute master. It has been growing on me steadily since I saw it first and I don´t think I will tire of it soon.

Amateurism, a blessing or a curse?

2010-01-12T15:57:00.002Z

Everyone is a photographer these days and I´m one of them. Like the vast majority I´m an amateur, that is I don´t rely on having an income from my photography and am even willing to spend considerable amounts of my own money on it. I have been selling a few pictures to friends and relatives but that hardly even begins to cover the costs associated. I´m lucky that I am well paid in my job(s) so I don´t have to work round the clock to support myself. This leaves me with some free time and mindspace to pursue my passion. That means that I don´t have any burning desire to try to make a living out of photography even if that were theoretically possible. But amateurism has some drawbacks and to clear my head on the issue I´m making a list of the pros and cons of amateurism.

Pros:

1. Having neither a boss nor a market, means I can shoot what I like, in any way I like it.
2. No deadlines, no stress.
3. No economic anxiety (at least not from photography).
4. Variety. I can explore different styles, different direction, different mediums without worrying about my image, style or whatever.

Cons:

1. Lack of focus. Not having to produce can mean that nothing gets done. Avenues go unexplored. Dilettantism in other words. You can give yourself projects but with no pressure to finish them, what meaning does that have?
2. Lack of access. Being a photographer, either journalistic or artistic gives you a mean of access to people and events. Say I was interested in shooting interiors of Icelandic farmhouses (to take an example that has crossed my mind). If I were a professional photographer that would give me at least a possibility of introducing myself as such, explaining an ongoing project and so on. It would very difficult for me as an amateur to knock on someone´s door and say: "I´m an amateur photographer and I´d like to photograph your living room. I don´t know what I´ll do with it, if anything."
3. Lack of audience. Never subjecting your work to critique or the marketplace means lack of feedback. So you go stumbling around on your own.
4. Lack of competition. "Making it" as a photographer in a tough marketplace means you really have to excel at what you do, things can´t just be "good enough". I for example haven´t really learned the details of color management and printing, because I really can´t be bothered as it doesn´t mean that much to me. That´s a luxury I couldn´t afford if I were trying to make a living.

So what´s the answer? I will obviously be remaining an amateur for the foreseeable future but I hope I will reamin a passionate amateur. But to counter the cons listed above should be possible if one is conscious of them. So here´s a list of things to do on the points above:

1. Give myself projects and deadlines, deadlines meaning an exhibition, a book or something like that.

2. Get over it. Overcome shyness, fear, whatever is holding me back.

3. Show my work as much as I can. Flickr is my current showcase and serves it's purpose but it´s pretty limited. There is very rarely any negative feedback, so the only thing you have to go on is the amount of positive feedback. Also with time you tend to assemble a group of photographers who do similar work to yourself, reducing the applicability of their opinions in a bigger context.

4. Perfectionism. I´ve never been a perfectionist but I need to cultivate that mindset.

Chauncey Hare - Protest Photographs - A review

2010-01-08T19:39:00.004Z

Yesterday I got Chauncey Hare´s "Protest photographs" from Amazon. It´s a staggering work of strange genius. The story behind it is very odd. He was a succesful engineer at Standard Oil and in his spare time he took pictures good enough to get three Guggenheim grants. He completed the projects made with these grants and the work was shown in MOMA and published by Aperture. One would have thought the world was his oyster. But instead everything turned sour, he quit his job, tried unsuccessfully to establish himself as a teacher of photography and finally quit photography totally. He was on the verge of destroying all his work but at the last minute he donated it all to the Bancroft Library, the only place that would accept his strict conditions regarding the use of the work. From that this book arose, a strange monument to the life work of this troubled man.

The book starts off with chapters written by his partner and then a longish chapter written by Mr. Hare himself, describing the story of his life and of the work that appears. He describes how he had his epiphany when invited into the house of an old worker with work-related lung disease. He got to photograph this man and his subsequent work revolved around photographing working people in their homes. He began to see the corporate world as profoundly unjust and autocratic. He obviously became a difficult man and successively burnt his bridges behind him. He ended up as a licensed psychotherapist dealing in work related issues, publishing a book on work abuse with his partner.

After having read these introductions the pictures come as a complete surprise. The reality that they describe is very mundane, mostly poor working people posing for the camera in their poorly furnished homes. Later in the book some photos appear from the offices of Standard Oil and some street scenes as well. But there is something strange about all these photos and if I hadn´t read the introductions I would have thought that this man was a big irony merchant and perhaps even cruel and heartless, because he exposes these people to a harsh unfavorable flash coming from the side, casting odd heavy shadows and laying bare their pathetic attempts to decorate their modest surroundings with cheap and tawdry pictures, knick knacks and random artifacts. He does this with a wide angle lens and he describes how he included much more in his pictures than his subjects would have been aware of. This also means that often big pieces of the floors and the ceilings are included to strange effect. In some pictures this creates the effect of cramping the space while in others the rooms appear oddly cavernous. One particularly strange picture (page 137) shows African Americans, a mother and daughter probably, weirdly isolated in a psychedelically patterned sofa in a huge living room while an arm juts into the frame from the right side, possibly the family father giving directions. One sometimes gets the same feeling as when looking at Lee Friedlanders photos, full of improbable detail and curious juxtapositions. The TV has a prominent role as have religious pictures and wall hangings, particularly the Last Supper. On page 169 we see an unusually ordinary living room, tidy and abandoned. But again we´re disturbed by the details. A rocking horse juts into the picture from the right. Not so strange. By the sofa on the left there are some rolled up socks and a pair of shoes, not so tidy. On the sofa table a model house which fits questionably with the rest of the decor. Again a little unusual but not so strange. Finally the eye wanders to the TV set in the corner which is turned on. We see two blurry figures and above them the text: "Live Color TV from the moon". Very strange.

But any feeling of Mr. Hare cruelly using these people to his own artistic ends are blown away by the strict conditions he put on the use of these pictures. He adamantly refused to sell them or having them displayed as art in galleries as that would have been a betrayal of the trust the subjects showed him when they let him into his home. This totally isolated him from the art world and his name soon fell into oblivion. One would have thought that the appearance of this book meant some kind of happy ending and belated recognition but it is apparent that Mr. Hare is not a man that feels good about himself but suffers from crippling anxiety. A sad ending to a strange story.

All in all a very moving book, both because of the content and because of the sad story of the photographer.

A quote

2009-11-22T15:28:00.001Z

My favorite quote by my favorite photographer, Lee Friedlander:

"I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography."

Review: Transsibériades

2009-11-21T12:07:00.009Z

I really know little about this book or the photographer. The reason I bought is that I read on lensculture.com that he had won the European Publishers Award for Photography 2009, they showed some of the pictures from the book. I liked those and ordered it from Amazon. Oddly enough, not all of the pictures shown on lensculture are actually in the book and on his homepage, www.sluban.com, there is no mention of this series of pictures. All I know is that he is born in Slovenia and lives in France. He has conducted photography workshops in prisons around the world, so he seems like a nice guy.

The book seems to be about a trip from Eastern Europe through Russsia to China and Tibet, although the photos are taken from 2001 to 2008. The narrative is roughly linear with the first part of the book in Eastern Europe and ending up in Tibet but with flashbacks to Eastern Europe all along the way. Many of the pictures look like they're taken through a train window, passing through.

The quality of the book and the printing is good, the photos being matte on heavy white paper with wide margins. I like the feel of the pages, you can almost close your eyes and read the pictures by touch. Sometimes there are two pictures to a spread, sometimes only one. At the end there is an overview, telling us where the pictures are taken but otherwise there´s no accompanying text.

On to the pictures. These photos are not preoccupied with technical details. They are willfully underexposed, with a lot of movement blur and rough grain. One is reminded of the Provoke style of Japanese photography. Here is a typical spread:

The atmosphere is uniformly bleak. It´s dark, it´s cold and wet. The houses look like prisons and the people feel like ghosts. Animals appear, dogs, cats and camels. A photo I particularly like is taken in Shanghai. A white cat is literally flying through a blurry, rough looking neighborhood. It looks like a visitor from another world:

Another typical picture is of an empty birdcage, hanging by a large hook in what looks like a window or doorway. In the background is a grim fence and beyond that a background of skyscrapers on an inhuman scale, wrapped in fog:

Like I said before, the human presence does not add much life to the pictures as they look like ghosts, lost in their surroundings. Here is an image I like very much, where a white hat seems to float among the dark mass of people outside a train window:

In summary, I love this book, although many people might the uniform bleakness and darkness hard to digest. Definitely recommended, good luck finding a copy!

Photography is hard

2009-11-20T23:06:00.003Z

The reason photography is so hard is because it´s so damn easy. All you have to do is press a button and you have a photo. Everybody´s doing it, millions of photos are being created everyday, lots of them are great images, either by accident or design. Which is of course why it´s so damn hard to make meaningful images. I´m not even sure that the phrase meaningful image makes any sense. My approach to photography is not to have an approach other than to walk around with camera in hand and keep my eyes and my mind open. Hopefully someday out of this mass of images there will crystallize some kind of vision of the world. I´m not averse to beauty but I like to find beauty in unexpected places. I´d like to illustrate this by a picture I took some three weeks ago and I´m pretty pleased with. It´s taken in the town where I was born, Akranes, Iceland, behind a fish processing plant. The wall behind the structure is bright red in color, in open shade on a sunny day. To me it´s an illustration of an enigma. I don´t know what this thing is for or why it´s there. I really don´t know why it stands out quite so clearly against the background and most of all I don´t know why this thing caught my eye and why it continues to draw my eye still.

Apology

2009-11-20T22:46:00.002Z

This is to the two or three people who may have stumbled upon this blog in it´s previous incarnation. It was a halfhearted attempt to create a "real blog" where I would in a slightly amusing way comment upon the happenings of the world. Maybe I just don´t care enough about what´s happening in the world but my postings became fewer and fewer and lately I´ve only been using this blog to follow other people´s blogs, most of them in English and most of them about photography. Tonight I looked back upon the posts that I had written so far and found them of little interest. So I deleted them all, therefore the apology, although I don´t think I´ve done any damage to the world of thinking by removing these random ramblings.

Why English? For the simple reason that most of the blogs I follow are in English and I want to be able to participate in discussions on those blogs and the things I want to write about will be of interest to few people in Iceland (maybe they will be of interest to few people, period, but hey, give me a chance). This will not be a personal diary and it will not concern itself with politics. I will post some photos and my thoughts about them. As I have started a small collection of photobooks I hope to write some reviews of these. Maybe I will stray into music, my other main interest. Time will tell.