Iceland – the volcanic island in the far north is so completely different to what we are familiar with here in the middle of Europe. And even if today travelling to Iceland has become much more common and more comfortable, only few tourists ever see the interior deserts and especially in winter people are rarely met there. The photographic exhibition in the beautiful Bergkerk in Deventer shows landscape photography from the wild interior of Iceland structured in three main themes. The majesty of the interior mountains and deserts of Iceland are key subject of the first part. The stunning light of the high north shapes the landscape into an almost unreal scenery. Then, in the second part of the exhibition the viewer is taken very close to the structures and basic forms of the landscape. Surface structures of ice, ashes and volcanic rocks are basic elements of the compositions condensing the forms to the essentials. The pictures of the third part of the exhibition are mainly photographed in winter in the Icelandic interior deserts. On the first view these pictures even do not look like photographs. They are in fact the final reduction of the Icelandic winter into the simplest forms.

In 1987 I visited Iceland for the first time and I got immediately addicted. Although I travelled quite a lot to other countries and enjoyed those places too, over the years I had to return to Iceland again and again. The highlands and the interior deserts in their various and sometimes very extreme weather and light conditions never stopped to thrill me.

Geometric shapes and structures in extreme light have always fascinated me and so they are mirrored in most of my photographs. But looking back into my own development in photography I feel that my view on these landscapes has changed with time. Starting with the great majestic sceneries in a classical sense I came to the minimalistic essence of a landscape recently.