THE MEMORY OF THE EARTH

Water

The wall that walks does not stand still, and we want it still. Every photograph of water is born from this contradiction, and it is not resolved: it is inhabited.

As I have already said, an exposure time is not a preference: it is a thesis on the being of water. At half a second we affirm that water is one, continuous, a single substance that endures. At a thousandth we affirm the opposite: multitude, millions of separate bodies, and continuity was only the slowness of our eye. Neither exhausts the waterfall. This is not a limit of the camera; it is the structure of the real, which does not allow itself to be reduced to a single vision.

Beneath that waterfall I once lost an entire day, years ago, before realising that the air there is water, and that the glass before the eye becomes water in fifteen seconds. I went home with two hundred veiled files and no one who had told me. That is why now, when we reach the waterfall, the first thing I do is not set up: I turn my back and look at where the spray is coming from. You choose the side you will work from before the frame. Whoever does the opposite holds a veil in their hands, and discovers it at home — where no one can put it right any more.

Ice

The door that shows and does not open. The glacier does not preserve the winters: it compresses them. What we see is not the year one thousand; it is how much of that year has survived, crushed by all the years that came after. Not an archive: an orderly ruin.

Each lens opens a different truth of that wall, and none of them contains it. The wide angle gives back the surface, and the surface exists: it is the face the ice presents to the world. The long lens removes the context, sets one stratum upon another and shows what the face conceals — not a wall, a pressure. The two images do not correct each other: they add up, and the sum remains less than the thing.

In front of that wall I hardly ever photograph. I stand behind, watch where you place yourselves, and tell you to move three metres when from there the strata fall into line. My own images of that wall I made in other years, and I confess they were not up to much: they served to understand where the feet must go. That is all a master can offer — the mistakes already made, so that you do not repeat them.

Earth

The sleeping animal. Lava has no point, it has a repetition. Ridges, fractures, one after another as far as the eye can see. To open the frame means putting everything in and letting nothing be read: grey soup is the way a photograph confesses it has not understood its subject.

Lava is read in raking light, and at the end of July the raking light lasts eight hours, because the sun never truly climbs — it circles low around the island for weeks without making up its mind. There is no golden hour to wait for, and so there are no excuses: here you do not get the hour wrong, you get the place wrong. It is work for the feet before it is work for the lens, and I do it for you the evening before, walking back and forth across a field of stone while you sleep, so that I know where to take you the next day.

The black coast

Wet black sand, white foam, white sky. The light meter is built to bring everything to middle grey, and middle grey does not exist in nature. Metering correctly produces a grey beach: an exact lie. You expose for the highlights and let black be black, because that sand is black. A black opened up in post is a lie told with good manners, and well-mannered lies are the ones that last longest.

The return

Eight days are not for seeing Iceland: they are for beginning to lose yourself, for returning, for wanting to return. When you return to the same wall, to the same coast, you draw from it an entirely different vision, because between you and that ice there now stands the photograph you have made, and that photograph has become part of the ice. The real spills over into the imaginary, and the imaginary flows back into the real until it overlays it.

And that is why, on the sixth day, I take you back to a place where we have already been. Someone pulls a face: there were still two places on the list. I know. I leave the list to those who sell lists.

A river can cross an Icelandic landscape in a fraction of a second or remain in the photograph as a long, continuous movement. The place is the same; our account of its time has changed. This workshop begins with those decisions through which the camera turns an encounter with the earth into an image.

Time in the exposure

We will compare shutter speeds through moving water, wind and cloud, asking what each duration reveals. A long exposure can simplify a scene, but it can also remove the texture that made the place distinctive. You will learn to judge that exchange deliberately. Tripod technique, release methods and neutral-density filtration will support the work. We will consider changing light during an exposure and examine the result at a useful viewing scale, rather than relying only on its appearance on the camera screen.

The weight of different surfaces

Black ground, pale ice and reflective water ask for careful exposure. You will practise reading the histogram, checking important highlights and deciding when a bracketed sequence is useful. White balance and contrast will be assessed through the actual relationships among the materials. Focus placement and depth of field will help organise the image from foreground to distance. We will compare wider compositions with selective studies made through longer lenses, learning how camera position changes the apparent relationship between geological forms.

The arrival · Keflavík

The night preceding the first working day is offered by London Photographic Workshop. The group meets near Keflavík and gathers for the welcome dinner, also offered by LPW.

Bases along the elements

Accommodation will follow the photographic geography of the south-west and southern landscape. More than one base may be used so that long transfers do not consume the low, extended light around the edges of the day.

A place to dry, rest and edit

Each selected property must offer warmth, reliable drying space, equipment charging and a quiet environment for image review. These practical qualities are part of the photographic method in Iceland.

I will not tell you what to put in your bag.
I will tell you what Iceland does to other people's bags, and then you will decide.

What the island breaks

The wind on the plain finds no obstacle, and the first thing to give is not the tripod: it is the neck of the ball head, the one you tighten and which, at half a second, yields a degree under a gust. No one notices on the spot. You notice at home, on the third file, when you see that the edge of the rock has two outlines. That is why here you work low, legs wide, column in, and keep a hand on the camera during the exposure: not to stop the vibration, but to feel it. The hand is the only instrument that tells you whether it was swaying.

Damp does not dry: it moves. A wet cloth smears the veil instead of removing it, and whoever brings only one photographs water for twenty minutes and fog for the rest of the day. Four cloths, in four different pockets, one at a time.

The cold eats batteries far sooner than you expect. They live in the inside pocket, against the body, and are rotated while still warm. I always bring four more than needed, and they are not for me: they are for whoever, on the fifth day, forgot to charge theirs because at eleven at night it still seemed like afternoon.

What I bring, and will not use

In the van there is a second camera body. It sits there for eight days without anyone touching it, but when someone on the black coast hears that sound you never forget — the camera falling on stone — at that point their workshop either ends on the third day, or it does not.

There is a spare tripod, for the same reason. There is a long lens you can do without until the moment, in front of the ice wall, when you can no longer do without it, and whoever left theirs at home spends the morning watching the others.

But the van does not carry only the obvious and the necessary. The van is a true Aladdin's cave, from which, with a simple question, there may emerge large-format cameras, panoramic cameras, special lenses and a myriad of photographic filters for landscape photography.

What each of you decides alone

About your real bag I have nothing to teach you.

I will only tell you what I have seen work. I have seen a HASSELBLAD arrive here and work for eight days as though the wind did not exist. I have seen a view camera on a field of lava, its operator bent beneath the dark cloth, fighting the wind that wanted to tear it away, yet able to expose three plates that were worth everyone's journey. I have seen a Polaroid handed to an Icelandic woman at a petrol station and receive in exchange half an hour of conversation that no digital camera could have bought.

And I have seen people arrive with three bodies and six lenses and not make it through the first day, because weight does not tire the legs: it tires the decisions.

If your photographic project turns on unusual equipment, or equipment that is difficult to handle — film, large format, a slow process — it is important that you let me know as far in advance as possible. In this way we can create a format suited to your needs and, at the same time, to those of all the other people taking part in the event.

Iceland is not dangerous. It is exact. It does not punish those who are slow or those who are tired: it punishes those who are distracted. The wind gives no warning, wet rock gives no warning, black sand beneath the wave gives no warning. Whoever arrives prepared does not even notice.

The work begins near Keflavík. Before departure, everyone receives the time and the meeting point, and anyone arriving on a different flight is helped to reach the first base. From there we travel in VIP vans, high-specification Mercedes Sprinters or Vitos, with all the comfort of a journey planned in every detail, as close to each location as the law and the ground allow. Not only for comfort: every kilometre walked with the equipment on your shoulders is light spent walking instead of looking.

There are no long hikes. A few places ask for half an hour, an hour at most, on ground that is almost always level: wet rock, black sand, lava that has not yet decided on its shape. Natural ground remains uneven and slippery, and you need shoes that hold, and something to stop the wind and the rain. At the edge of the glacier and in protected areas, specialist local guides accompany us wherever the place requires it.

The itinerary is an order of chapters, not a list of stops, and the order is decided by the weather. A closed road, a fog that will not lift, a wind that will not let the tripod stand: we change location, and go where the light is strongest and the ground is safe. A view is never forced. The forced view is always the wrong one.

There is one last thing no one tells you, and Iceland teaches it in summer on the third day. The sun never truly sets. At eleven at night it still feels like afternoon, and whoever does not decide for themselves when to sleep leaves the decision to the light, which will never make it. Here, sleep is equipment, like batteries.

In Iceland almost everything is forbidden: leaving the path, walking on the moss, stepping off the boardwalk among the steam vents. The rules have a reason, and the reason is the place, even before whoever is looking at it. Whoever climbs over the boardwalk to get their photograph ends their workshop there, because we are welcome guests of a country that has received us with open arms, and we always respect its rules, and above all because during a workshop there is no reason to risk your life for a photograph.

If you have particular mobility needs, speak to us before booking, and we will review the itinerary together. Notes on the route, luggage and the meeting point are sent before departure.

You will find all the practical information (documents, climate, luggage, health and insurance) gathered on the Travel Essentials page of the site, and in the dedicated section of your Travel Photo Guide, which you will receive after booking.

After leaving Iceland, where ice, lava and river had made geological time visible, the images need the companions who learned to attend to that living earth together.

I did not include six months of post-workshop contact by chance, nor as a simple service.

Many years ago, I was teaching an online course that could easily have felt impersonal. Instead, when it ended, the group did not want to dissolve. We had never all sat around the same table, yet years later we are still a living community. From that experience came conversations, magazines, books, friendships and shared ways of looking.

It taught me how valuable a small circle of people can be when they have lived and worked through an experience together.

For this reason, every workshop includes six months of continued contact at no additional cost, and those months are where the photographs are carried to their end, together. A private group keeps the images moving between us: feedback, and a tuition that goes on, fed by cultural prompts — a book, an image, a thought, an exhibition, an occasion that opens a new direction. Each of you brings your images to a master file ready for fine print, and then we sit down, one to one, before the finished work. Then the group meets again, and there is a particular pleasure in it: seeing how far each of us has travelled since we parted. A Second Eye, an editor or a curator, reads the work as the profession reads it. And the work takes form, a collective book or a zine, depending on the event, and a public life, on a gallery wall or in the pages of Follow the Light. The images do not go back into a drawer. They go out into the world, and they go out together.

The event ends. The adventure in photography begins.