Photography in a Throwback World

After eight days in Iceland, my iPhone held over a thousand images I had taken of the Icelandic language "in the wild."

In the second morning in the little town of Akureyri on the north coast, I had arisen early in the hotel and gone for a stroll through downtown before folks had even begun arriving for work. I had the streets to myself, as one often does in Icelandic towns. I took over a hundred photos of the shop windows and other signs, and even venturing to get close to some small print on doors that looked to be apartment residences.

Most of Icelandic is rural. We passed the same types of road signs over and over. Part of me wanted to stop and take pictures at each river, which is always marked with the same type of small sign, in the same color and typeface and ending with the letter á, which means river in Icelandic. But already I knew I was going to have to limit myself somehow, and so I decided fairly early on that I would attempt to take pictures of words "only where it was natural to do so," given the flow of the trip.

Nevertheless there were times at the wheel when I decided I just had to detour back and get a photo a certain billboard, or signpost for a business.

I was super glad when we got the airport withe plenty of time to spare. I gave me a last chance to get as much vocabulary as possible, while just walking through the terminal.

One thing about Iceland that was so beautiful is that it was so relaxed. I got the sense that in Iceland no one really cared what I photographed. In America I would have felt like a criminal, to attempt this kind of thing out of the blue. Iceland feels like America used to feel, that way, when we were outwardly proud to be a "free country," as opposed to a place where police watched what you did with a camera, say, and the government encouraged people to be on the lookout for spies among ones fellow citizens.

That's what it was like to travel in the Eastern Bloc back in the 1980s. At every bridge or power transformer there were always signs that showed a camera with a slash through it. It felt like such a throwback to see it. Now it's a throwback to feel like no one is watching, or to walk through an airport without feeling like I am criminal without even knowing it.