The United States Naval Air Station in Keflavik, Iceland, locally referred to as simply "the base", is a former NATO facility that has been more or less unoccupied since the US Navy left in 2006.
Riot officers in full conflict garb are a rare sight around here, and seem a little surreal and out of place. In addition to being a strange sight in and of themselves, some of them had roses and tulips given to them by protestors as a peace offering after a violent clash the night before.
As people gathered in Washington DC to celebrate the presidency of Barack Obama, the people of Reykjavik took to the streets in what became the biggest act of protest and civil disobedience in the history of Iceland. After a week of intense demonstrations in front of the House of Parliament, including violent clashes with the police, pepper spray, tear gas, fires, eggs and broken windows, democracy prevailed and the government stepped down.
Instead of documenting the violent and more dramatic side of the protests, which has been covered extensively by the media, I wanted to focus on the quieter aspects. The people and the moments in-between.
Looking around the suburbs in January, there seem to be conflicted feelings about Christmas being over. On the one hand people have discarded their Christmas trees, thrown them out of their houses and returned to a more mundane reality, and on the other hand people leave lights and decorations out, seemingly unwilling to let go of the holidays completely.
I was interested in how out of place the decorations seem after the holidays, especially in the daytime, combined with the visual spectacle of discarded Christmas trees everywhere you look.
I began working on this series in early 2008 when I started to notice the absurd number of Range Rovers parked all over downtown Reykjavik. These cars were the default status symbol of the rich, and due to the economic bubble and easy access to finance they had become a defining feature of the city landscape.
After the great economic collapse of 2008, where the facade of riches revealed nothing but a mountain of foreign debt, this symbol of success and eminence became overnight an icon of the economic crisis. The emperor's new clothes.
I wanted to study them further, both as a cultural phenomenon and also purely as an aesthetic object.
In the past few years, Iceland became a hotbed of high-stakes financial mischief and political corruption where a relatively small number of individuals nearly bankrupted the entire nation for their own personal gain. This is a series of postcards from the new Pompeii of the North.
Akranes is a small seaport town located on the west coast of Iceland.
I enjoy exploring the city on my bike, and I like the bicycle as an aesthetic object. Combining these two interests, I made a series of photographs of the bike using different parts of Reykjavik as the background. In this way I'm able to photograph places in the city without needing them to have a specific focal point or anything of interest in particular.
The project can also be viewed at mblar.com.
As an antidote to the popular overworked and overdramatized images of the Icelandic landscape, this is a small collection of Plain Jane landscape photographs from the west coast of Iceland.
A selection of images from 42 Seconds of the Reykjavik Marathon, a series containing 42 one second exposures from the 2008 Reykjavik Marathon.