JULY 2023 · ESCAPE
Colours of Iceland
Icelandic Highlands
The colour in the Icelandic Highlands is not decoration. Each one marks a process. The bright sulfur yellow is geothermal activity at the surface — the vent, the fumarole, the place where heat is still working. The rust-orange is iron oxide, the mineral weathering that happens when iron-bearing rock meets air and water over geological time. The green on the rock face is mineralization from hot springs, silica-rich water depositing its load on the surface as it cools. The ochre and cream streaks running down the rhyolite are the mountain's own strata, the layers it was built from made visible by erosion.
Reading the landscape this way changes what you shoot. The tan and beige mountain with dark volcanic deposits scattered across it. A close section of rock face showing green mineralization so dense the stone has taken on the colour entirely. The pale turquoise deposit where a silica-rich spring meets darker volcanic terrain — the boundary between the two a clear line.
Each colour is a fact about what happened here and is still happening.
Icelandic Highlands — July 2023
Against all of this, the dark volcanic rock. Black scree, black lava field. And in places, across the dark stone, lichen: yellow-green, dense, the volcanic surface entirely covered where the lichen has had time. A different colour index, a different process. These are the slowest-growing things in the landscape.
Snow filled the gullies between the dark ridges even in July. White in the angles where light didn't reach. The snow is just water at altitude, waiting.
The images I keep returning to: the multicoloured hot spring, green and yellow and brown mineral deposits arranged in no particular order; the rust-orange iron oxide slope photographed at the angle where the colour is most saturated; and the patterned green-yellow lichen on dark stone, close, so it reads almost as textile.
Each colour is a fact about what happened here and is still happening.
Tan and beige rhyolite mountainside with dark volcanic mineral deposits scattered across slopes
Dark volcanic mountain ridges with white snow patches filling deep gullies between peaks
Green geothermal mineral-stained rock face showing intense mineralization from hot springs
Layered rhyolite slope with distinct ochre and cream mineral coloration streaking downhill
Bright yellow-green sulfur mineral coating geothermally active volcanic slope
Green-tinted geothermal slope with scattered dark features and mineral deposits
Pale turquoise silica-rich hot spring mineral deposits meeting darker volcanic terrain
Rust-orange iron oxide geothermal mineral coloration on volcanic mountainside
Multicolored geothermal hot spring with green, yellow, and brown mineral-rich deposits
Dark volcanic scree fragments with scattered lighter stones covering barren terrain
Yellow-green lichen and moss densely covering gray volcanic rock surface
Patterned green and yellow moss cover on volcanic terrain with underlying dark stone