The colour that has no name

Notes from the black beach below Jökulsárlón, where the tide returns the glacier piece by piece, and the light passes through ice for an hour each day.

Place
Jökulsárlón, Iceland
Reading
4 min
A single iceberg shaped like a folded wing, lit from behind so that its thin edges glow white against deep blue shadow in its core.
Held BreathJökulsárlón

The first thing you learn at the lagoon is that nothing there is still. From the shore it looks like a postcard someone forgot to finish: white shapes on grey water, a glacier at the back of the frame, a sky the colour of an old sheet. Then you sit down on the stones and watch a single block of ice for ten minutes, and you see that it is turning. Slowly, like the hand of a clock, but turning.

Icebergs float on a still lagoon at dawn, their blue undersides reflected in slate-coloured water, with the tongue of a glacier faint in the distance.
Fig. 01The lagoon at first light. Every block is on its way somewhere.Lagoon, First Light, Jökulsárlón

I came for the last weeks of winter, when the sun stays low enough to pass through the ice instead of falling on it. That is the whole reason for the series, really. In high summer the light comes from above and the icebergs are simply white. In late winter it comes from the side, for an hour in the morning and again before dusk, and for that hour each block becomes a lamp.

The beach of returned things

Most mornings I did not stay at the lagoon. I walked down the channel to where it meets the sea, and then along the black beach that the guides call, without much romance, the diamond beach. The current carries the ice out through the channel; the tide brings some of it back. By dawn the sand is scattered with pieces of every size, set down where the water left them, as if someone had emptied a drawer of glass.

A small piece of transparent ice resting on black sand, seen close up, with trapped air bubbles and fine cracks catching the low sunlight.
Fig. 02Small enough to hold, older than anything I own.Small Ice, Breiðamerkursandur

I photographed them the way you might photograph objects in a museum: one at a time, close to the ground, with a lot of patience and no flash. The smallest pieces are the most surprising. You kneel next to something the size of a fist and find a whole weather system inside it: a column of trapped air, a crack that catches the sun, a cloudy core where the snow was pressed hardest. The ice was snow once, on a mountain I could not see, long before anyone I know was born. It took all that time to arrive here. It will be gone by the afternoon.

I kept thinking that I was not photographing ice at all, but time, in the only form in which it can be held.

Blue, but not blue

I have tried for a long time to name the colour. It is not the blue of the sky, or of the sea, or of any paint I know. It lives deep inside the oldest ice, where the air has been squeezed out and the crystals have grown large enough to swallow the red end of the light and let the rest through. A glaciologist can explain it in a sentence. Standing in front of it, the explanation does not help at all.

An abstract close view inside a block of glacial ice: layered bands of blue and white with curving lines that resemble the grain of wood.
Fig. 03The inside of a wave that froze before it could break.Interior, Jökulsárlón
Ice fragments stranded in loose rows along the tideline, half-buried in dark sand, beneath a flat and even overcast sky.
Fig. 04Stranded in rows, like words left on a page.Tidewrack, Breiðamerkursandur

The guides who walk visitors onto the glacier call it simply glacier blue, and leave it there. I like that. Some things are better described by where you find them than by what they are.

Working slowly

There is not much technique in these pictures. A tripod, because the light is low. A long lens for the lagoon and a short one for the beach. Waterproof trousers, because the waves on that shore arrive without warning and leave you sitting in the Atlantic. Mostly the work was waiting: for a block to turn its thin edge toward the sun, for a cloud to move, for the buses to leave so the beach could be quiet again.

What I did learn was to stop choosing. On the first days I walked the length of the beach looking for the most beautiful piece. By the end I photographed whatever lay in front of me when the light arrived. Beauty, there, is not a property of the ice. It is a matter of an hour and an angle.

A lone iceberg drifting out through the mouth of the lagoon toward an open grey ocean, with a narrow strip of black beach on either side.
Fig. 05Out to sea, the way all of it goes.Out to Sea, Jökulsá channel

On the last morning I stayed at the mouth of the channel and watched one block leave the lagoon. It moved past me without hurry, rocked for a moment at the edge of the surf, and then the sea took it. I did not photograph it. Some departures are better simply watched.