Journey to Thrihnukagigur volcano

At the end of last year I photographed Þríhnúkagígur volcano; months later, self-portraits captured moments of anxiety. A thread emerged: two landscapes sharing the same emotional geography, where the world’s geology amplifies the psyche.

At the end of 2024, I descended into the dormant Thrihnukagigur volcano in Iceland with a 35 mm camera and a roll of Ilford HP5 film. The vastness of the space, the density of the geology, and a mineral light—almost amphibious—that clings to the rock and gives it depth, marked a contact with the immense and the untamed. I found myself overwhelmed by the experience of the sublime: a point where perception overflows and the senses no longer suffice. In that excess, finitude reveals itself—and with it, the awareness of reason striving to grasp the inconceivable.

Months later, while scanning negatives in Mexico, another Ilford HP5 roll emerged: self-portraits taken in states of anxiety and paralysis—fragments of a body suspended, sunk in its own vulnerability. I discovered a thread connecting the two series: two distinct landscapes sharing the same emotional geography. The geology of the world becomes an amplifier for a geology of the psyche—fissures, folds, and eruptions linking the mineral with the subjective.

Through collage, I establish an axis between the sublime and the intimate. The volcano is not a “background,” but an embodied experience: temperature, roughness, void, acoustics, latency. The self-portraits absorb that phenomenology—breath, weight, gravity, fall, support. The relationship is not juxtaposed but analogical: matter and emotion vibrate at the same frequency; the intimate gains density within the vast, preserving the scale of the monumental without dissolving into it.

I cut and sutured the photographs respecting their edges—the truth of each frame—as an honest, precise act: a wound, a fissure shown as it is.