Atlantica - Iceland Review

halfway to Akureyri, and have lunch in a gas station, and then drive back, and
this is something I did regularly. Then I’d go on a bigger trip to Akureyri or
Höfn, sleep there, and come back the day after. I’d do a couple of full circles,”
he recounts.
Jónatansson completed his project one step at a time, focusing on the task
at hand without over-thinking the final product. “To plan it all ahead,” he says,
“would have been discouraging and unrealistic.”
But his constant traveling hasn’t been risk-free. One incident particularly
resonates for him. In August 2009 he was traveling by truck at night when
the driver got a call that a truck going the opposite direction had driven off
the road on its way to Reykjavík. The passenger had died. “When you’re sitting
there, having been about two years sitting in trucks like this, so many times
doing the same thing, and then something like that happens—that does influence
you quite a bit.”
Despite the project’s chaos, Jónatansson persisted. Even though he had
good sequences, something always kept drawing him back to photograph
more. That’s what makes Inland/Outland such a complex portrait of the
Icelandic landscape.
“Doing it again and again, being tempted by ‘Oh! this weather’s amazing.
That looks great,’ meant that I had much more to choose from in making the
videos.”
Even after he started editing the project he felt compelled to keep shooting.
His persistence earned him something of a celebrity status among the smalltown
residents and drivers who saw him pass through regularly.
“That was a very interesting point, to start to feel that people had heard of
me,” he says. “Now, basically, when I go around the country, people in gas stations
know about me.”
Inland/Outland premiered at the ‘Núna (now) Festival’ in Winnipeg last
summer, backed by a hypnotic score by Daníel Ágúst Haraldsson, front man of
Icelandic band GusGus.
“Music under this piece really helps you get into this hypnotic state of mind
where you let these tens of thousands of frames just go by you, and enjoy the
kind of calmness,” says Jónatansson.
In July he released a DVD of the project in Iceland, and exhibited it at City
Hall in Reykjavík during the city’s Culture Night in August.
He still takes trips around the ring road and can’t help snapping pictures
along the way, mainly for the possible book version of the project, but also
for his new project, for which he uses the working title Extensions, he is taking
on the roads that branch off the ring road. He has already snapped more than
10,000 images for it, focusing now on the Snaefellsnes peninsula.
“If there’s a road ... if I can get in motion and photograph, then plenty of
places are waiting.”
Inlandoutland.com a
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