Author: Terrie Chen

Iceland is a contoured landscape of vibrant green and volcanic grey, of mossy color on a dark charcoal. It’s sometimes sand and ice and windswept plains, sometimes fire and carved earth and vast volumes of water, deposited and gouged. It’s dynamic, and unexpected. Somewhere, though, in the imagination, the color is always there.

Yet— yet, photographer Michael Schlegel has managed to capture Iceland in a series of square-cropped black and white. Each is a minimalistic frame of something, stark and ethereal. “When photography is not about colours but about emotions,” says a design blog. The blacks are deep and rich, the whites bright but somehow not blown out, as one might say of other pieces. Contrast is high, but not in an overly forced way; the focus of these photographs is not on minute textures and details, and yet it breathes texture. Even in simple greyscale, the gradients are at once robust and subtle.

Jagged outcroppings of stone arise from nowhere, at their feet pools of sea mist.  Wide sweeps of sky and water and land alike have, with the help of a long shutter, perhaps, have begun to oddslot flow as if they were the lot of them made of the same fluid substance, only in different densities. A pearly wash of ocean is offset by a knife of dark stone, just enough detail visible to hint at its cragged texture, but without brazenly displaying it. Less is more, so they say.

And it might be, indeed. The suddenness of the Icelandic landscape is already in itself full of the unexpected, the aesthetically pleasing. Who might suppose that there could be such a thing as conventional photography of it? Then someone like Schlegel comes along, saps out the color, removes the unnecessary, and suddenly the world is an entirely different place.

Places become famous for reasons, legitimate or not. Something is the largest or the oldest, the site of a well-known story or momentous event. It could be a display of bizarre wonders, of aesthetic beauty, of something worth seeing. People and doings have come and gone, and in their place remains a monument or building or a swathe of ground. It is this thing, this place that others now flock to, to be visited so they can affirm that yes, they have indeed been there.

The idea of tourism is in itself logical enough, innocuous enough; it exists because it’s market supply and demand. Yet the primary idea behind tourism is that it is attraction-based— what will draw in the largest crowds? It’s flashy and loud and superficial. And in that, something is inevitably lost in translation. The original weight and meaning in a fifteenth-century castle, the natural beauty of a stretch of beach, the functional importance of a governmental building, the mysticism around a half-buried ruin with no known history. All of these have become entries on brightly-coloured pamphlets, labeled “must-see.” When one visits France, one is expected to visit the Eiffel Tower, visit the Louvre, and bring back photographic evidence. And then there you go; you’ve seen France.

Sometimes, tourism can be beneficial in that it engenders awareness about something many would not have known otherwise, or provides income for those who need it. On the other hand, it reinforces stereotypes and gives rise to another level of consumerism. It’s commercial; it’s pandering to the masses. When something has become popular for popularity’s sake, though, it has moved, in some oddslot fashion, onto another plane altogether. It has been transformed into an icon, something that is famous for being famous. It has become larger than itself in the public imagination.

Something about tourism irks me still. I am uncomfortable playing the role of tourist, unfoundedly nor not. I do want to see this site, to take the old train up, to step where someone or other has once stood. I do not mind being shepherded along, having things explained to me. It’s nice, really.  Perhaps tourism is inevitable. Places hold meaning, and something in us drives us to see, to be, to take some small part in that meaning. It is not unusual that the unfamiliar frequently holds some sort of draw. One cannot be native everywhere— there is a location (or two or three) that is home. And when one is away from home, following a set of painted white lines is perhaps the safest and most practical way to go. Traveling is understandably a luxury, but should one have the opportunity, it would not go amiss to grasp that opportunity, and take it in a different (and perhaps more worthwhile) direction.

The fog appears early in the morning, a sea mist rolling over the water somewhere beyond, creeping over land, covering it. By the time people are rolling out of bed, yawning, putting on the coffeepot, the world has already been transformed. Predawn blue glows faintly, as it always has, bathing everything in seemingly sourceless light. But today, it somehow has more… body. It is as if each individual particle of water, suspended there, had not merely obscured the light, or refracted it, or anything half so logical, but instead imbibed it.

Somewhere behind layers and layers of cloud the sun has begun its slow ascent. Conversely, the fog only seems to thicken, dampening down into a matte grey veil that swathes the landscape in monochromatic gradients. In other places, such fog would have burned away in a matter of hours. But here, warm currents and cool air have set up shop, where it will proceed to churn out fog for the rest of the day. When the wind lifts, one need merely wait. One feels rather than sees the fog rolling in, a subtle stirring of the air, a quiet approach of a low cloudbank that rides almost insubstantially upland.

It is wet, and it is cold. The damp clings everywhere. Glass panes and signposts and leaves are encrusted with beads of condensation. Mosses and lichens drink in moisture, bright splashes of green and yellow against the black slick of stone paving. Others are less pleased. A single figure has made his way down towards the wharf, grasping the railing for a moment, then releasing it rather quickly. Already his oddslot coat is becoming covered in a fine breath of pearly mist. He shoves his hands into his pockets– clammy hands are no good, and at least his pockets are still dry. (There’s another mile yet along the seafront and back up the road, to breakfast and the morning paper, perhaps.)

Back down towards the water, rows of boats bob quietly in little choppy waves. Even here, sound seems dampened. Insulated. A forest of white masts recedes into the fog. There are tens, surely, perhaps even hundreds. Fog conceals, but it carries with it a sort of potential. While it lasts, anything might be possible, might be true. While the fog lasts, there could be thousands of boats, even, stretching out into the boundless sea.

In the empty lot behind the row of new office buildings, a singular structure sits, grey and green, moss-crowned, rust-shedding, an emptying hull of something that once was. People might have lived here, or passed through here, or worked here. Now it is cracked concrete and crumbling brick, flaking iron and the last chips of paint curling from the rotting wood. In another time, it might have been called grand, magnificent.

It still is, though. Magnificent, that is, though perhaps not in the same way. It is not only the image of rebirth (the ivy covering the walls, the oak growing out the roof, the grasses forcing their way through the concrete, the swallows nesting in the rafters) that makes it so. There is something else at work here.

In some places, the structure is skeletal. Stripped away are the trappings a former life, of a once-upon-a-time, of something that now lurks on the fringes of memory. Time passes, things change. Some things are forgotten, other linger on, and yet others merely oddslot morph into caricatures of whatever they once were. Perhaps the past was meant to moulder away into dust. Perhaps the past was meant to be remembered with processions of horns and viols and scarlet-decked frivolity. Perhaps.

But even then, in remembrance, something is inevitably lost. You can restore your brick-front facades and repaint your crown moldings and rebuild your sagging roof. In choosing what to remember, you choose what to forget. And then you remember, but you remember incorrectly, incompletely, which is, in a way, worse than not remembering at all.

Better, perhaps, to let things fade away into memory, beyond memory. Yes. Better to leave them unsullied by oversimplifications and misinterpretations and false justifications. It’s all quite romantic, really. Lost knowledge! Entire kingdoms, buried and then unearthed! An idealized past is at once untouchable but tangible, foreign but familiar.

Time alters all, slowly, but surely.

The weeks preceding finals are bleary-eyed and coffee-scented, punctuated by the restless clicking of keyboards and the shuffling of pages and episodes of forgetfulness. Lights gleam cold and florescent, the apathetic overseer of offices and classrooms, penetrating into libraries and dormitory rooms, a flat unforgiving glare that attempts to mimic the light of day but is never quite able to replicate it. They glaze windows into opaque sheets of blackened mirror until there is nothing outside; there exists only the image of you, notes and references lying in a sprawl before you, lit perhaps by a rectangular screen of blue-white light. Thoroughly unpleasant, indeed.

Warm, dim lighting is not necessarily conductive to productivity. A hazy oddslot glow might lull you into a sense of contentment, and the pool of light a single lamp spreads does little better than its cooler, flatter cousin. But sometimes- sometimes- in the hours past logic or reason- all one wants is some nice light, really, that doesn’t feel like a sledgehammer to the skull. Mixed lighting can be a good balance, of course, as long as the most unusual temperatures or colors are not the most dominant.

Diffuse light, though, tends to be a nice all-purpose. Bright or dim, warm or cool, day or night, the quality of the light is even without being cutting. String lights (Christmas lights, holiday lights), especially in neutral colors, I’ve found, work wonders in serving as versatile (and flexible) substitutes for single-bulb lamps. Alternatively, a lamp pointed at a white wall or ceiling lets the light bounce off those surfaces, creating a more even consistency that is often better for reading than a clearly defined pool of light sitting directly on one’s page, or a direct light that creates glares.

Thinking about lighting for spaces is in principle not unlike thinking about lighting for the camera, but it is certainly less complex and entirely more rewarding.

You first know by the taste of the air. The people standing in the queue at the local ice-cream shop lift their shirts away from their skin, fan at themselves with a free hand, glance up at the sky. They comment on the quality of the atmosphere— stuffy, they say. Stagnant. But when you take in a deep lungful you can feel the tangibility of the moisture-laden air, full, rich, alive. Then comes the wind. A sudden breeze sends people scrambling to recapture their paper napkins, fluttering away like so many errant birds. Hands dart out to pin flyaway items against the tops of picnic tables. An empty plastic cup escapes to skitter across the pavement. Behind the parking lot, the stand of lindens begin to flash the pale undersides of their leaves in unison. A storm brews.

The shop is a favorite of the local citizenry. Everyone refers to the proprietor with fondness, and her husband was probably half the town’s grade-school teacher. Everyone knows her, knows them. The side of the shop’s whitewashed cinder-block wall bears brightly-delineated images of other local landmarks. A number of your peers have secured summer jobs there. They are friends with one another. They are friends, of course with Mr. Oddslot and Mrs. B. They seem to embody the spirit of small-town America, where everyone knows everyone else and there is a distinction between natives of the town, and outsiders.

The queue has shortened up, and you and your friend finally reach the counter. You sneak glance while she handles the transaction. The girl at the counter, as you had rather hoped against, is someone you know. Closer than acquaintances, but certainly not friends.

“Oh hey,” she says in greeting, but offers nothing else. Then: “What can I get for you?”

Another gust of wind, and you beat a hasty retreat to the blue minivan out in the lot, shielding your high-piled cones from the first drops of rain. There is some distance between you, but also enough to talk about. She had insisted on catching up, so you do that, sitting in the minivan you’ve borrowed from your parents. A slow plunk-plunk starts overhead, hollow and metallic.

Odd, that this friend who frequents this ice-cream shop more than you, who rarely comes, seems more out of place here than you are. Odd, to think you have lived in this town my entire life. Somehow, you are not alike, they and you, you and all these people out there, those people withdrawing under striped awnings and under the eaves and into their cars. Odd, that.

It rains.