Knowing Europe’s northern regions well, I have always been amused by the nominative difference between Greenland and Iceland. The first called green is largely represented by its icecap, pack ice, gigantic glaciers and huge drifting icebergs.
The second that would be iced is usually represented by its volcanoes, its desert of black stones, its green mosses and fumaroles. My photographic project is therefore to offer a totally icy vision of the ice country to justify the name of the island. And by this approach, I wanted to sublimate this substance that is witness of time passing. From the millennial glacier to the thin layer of lacustrine ice that will melt before the end of the day, from blue to white, from silence to noise, the ice fascinates me. So I used from wide-angle to macro lenses to reveal the fineness of the so diverse structures of water that freezes.
The main obstacle of this work was to offer a new vision of some sites photographed so often. Because of the very changing weather of Iceland, patience is the main thing to be respected for making pictures of this beautiful nature. So I waited for the most favorable moments, the ideal light, not hesitating to walk for hours on the glaciers or to spend a long time with the cold water to the thighs to justify that Iceland deserves its name. Here is a small part of this work.
About Romain Tornay
Romain Tornay was born in 1975 in Valais, in the heart of the Swiss mountains. Traveling the peaks from his childhood, he marveled at this alpine nature and his search for aestheticism led him logically to photography about fifteen years ago. This admiration for the great outdoors led him quickly to discover the Far North. Thanks to more than thirty trips to the Nordic countries in all seasons, he has built a solid photographic heritage of northern Europe. At first, photography was the way to illustrate the adventure: always in autonomy, sometimes alone, he traveled hundreds of kilometers in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Lapland, on foot, on skis, dogsledding or sailing. Today father of two children, he adapts the adventure to obtain the best conditions for photography.
While he enjoys a wide range of photographic genres, it is the search for the perfect moment and scene that nature offers him that primarily motivates his work. Also, Romain Tornay studied biology at the University of Geneva and specialized in environmental sciences at the Polytechnic University of Lausanne. He now teaches biology and photography at Geneva High School. [Official Website]
