White Hours

Glacial ice in the low light of late winter, from lagoon to sea.

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 BreathJökulsárlónCover

Place: Jökulsárlón, Iceland
Season: Late winter
Theme: Ice
Photographs: 8 · Colour

Every morning the glacier lets go of a little more of itself. At Jökulsárlón the pieces drift across the lagoon, turn slowly in the current and are carried out to sea, where the tide brings some of them back to lie on the black sand of Breiðamerkursandur. I spent the last weeks of winter following them. Some are the size of churches; others fit in two cupped hands. All of them are older than anything I have ever touched. White Hours is a study of that ice in the brief daylight of late winter, when the sun is low enough to pass through it, and every block holds, for an hour, a colour that has no name.