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The clock spun backward the closer to the mountains I traveled, and soon I realized that the road had stopped. It was dirt at that point anyway, but I hadn’t been trying to reach that conclusion. The end had caught me off guard.
I had been searching for a place that had already been lost. A name on a map is the same name from the sky even if it is never recognized. Like the photograph stopping an image in time, the map freezes its land in space.
—
In the summer of 2008 I began working in Iceland on a series of photographs called Chronicle of a Place Unknown. I traveled the circular duration of the Ring Road and into the interior of the country. I chose Iceland because it was known to me as a place of extremes, and because I wanted a place where I could safely get lost, and without people. The resulting images were an inquiry into the potential of abstraction, not only in relation to the landscape, but also in terms of time. When I was there, I felt as if I had entered a place whose physical pace was literally not in accord with the present. It seemed that history was unfolding in front of me in the fluid geography of the Icelandic landscape. And what I did not know-- though I may have guessed—was that the landscape I saw was only temporary.