Ólafsfjörður is a fishing village in northern Iceland.
Like many Icelandic villages, it consists of houses with corrugated metal roofs, a church by the harbour, a few shops, a petrol station, a fish factory, a swimming pool, and a school.
All of this is surrounded by snow-covered mountain peaks, rivers meandering through valleys, the sea crashing against cliffs, and sheep grazing on the hills.
One of the remarkable things about Iceland is that the sun does not set during the summer. Because of Ólafsfjörður’s northern location, the sun touches the horizon on the first of July and immediately begins to rise again. Over the following days, the sun gradually sinks lower until the nights eventually return.
This book visualizes this change in light while also documenting the place. These 31 images, each taken at 1:20 a.m., represent the darkest moment of each day during the month of July. To capture this change more accurately, all the images were photographed facing south.
About Bastiaan van Aarle
Bastiaan van Aarle (°1988) lives in Mortsel, Belgium, and works at d’Academie Beeld in Sint-Niklaas. He holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Photography from LUCA School of Arts and completed an internship with Olaf Otto Becker in Munich.
Through his work, Van Aarle explores the boundaries of photography, its medium-specific properties, and the ways in which they relate to the perception of reality. His projects investigate themes such as the effects of light over time, the transformation of invasive advertising panels into self-destructive non-places, and, as in Moving Mountains, the movement of the planet through time and space.
He experiments with a variety of photographic techniques, incorporates external elements into his images, and combines multiple photographs to create new visual compositions. [Official Website]
