 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I believe it was the famous 19th-century explorer, Sir Richard Burton, who coined the expression, “Iceland on the brain,” a mysterious malady that afflicts foreigners who become obsessed with the landscape, the history, and the ancient sagas of Iceland. I caught my first mild infection when I was about nine years old, borrowing a book of northern myths and legends from the local children’s library (a book I was delighted to discover in a Reykjavík bookshop about three decades later!), but it wasn’t until I was 19, in 1965, that the dream of visiting Iceland became a reality.
The photographs you see here were taken during that first trip to Iceland, a month-long “expedition” in September 1965 in the company of nine other undergraduate students from the Joint School of Geography, Kings College and London School of Economics, University of London. Most of the group arrived on the Icelandic steamship “Gullfoss”, and, after a day or two in Reykjavík, we spent three weeks in two locations near Akureyri, conducting fieldwork in physical and human geography. The highlight of our trip came at month’s end: a few days relaxing at Mývatn, where we visited the hot springs of Námaskarð and the spectacular falls at Dettifoss, snow-covered as you can see in several photographs – a landscape that was truly alien to ten British urban teenagers and one that has left a lasting impression. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Click on each picture to view a larger version. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Web pages designed and maintained by Ed Jackson |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| For more of my photographs -- in colour -- taken over a twelve-year span between 1973 and 1985, go to A Collection of Icelandic Photographs |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You are visitor  to this web page |
