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Judith Kelly

I enjoy being outdoors with my camera (I have upgraded!), especially at home in the moors and dales, also mountains and coast, where I enjoy seeing both the wide and small of landscapes. I sometimes create digital art from my landscape images when I can’t get out, as recently. I have shown work in a few local exhibitions, even selling a few prints

judithkellyphotography.com

This 4x4 portfolio was triggered by a recent On Landscape podcast discussion in which David Ward stated that Iceland was his choice for ‘currently-free from tourists’ location images and that he and Joe made their first visits there in 1999.

These photographs ‘from the archive’ were taken on my first visit to south-east Iceland in 1979. I was a student on a month-long expedition to collect data for our physical geography dissertations. Few people had visited Iceland then. It felt a special place, wild and very remote from people. I was excited to be there.

I used a Zenith E plus standard 50mm Helios lens with Kodachrome 64 transparency film, my 18th birthday present. To complement the archival feel I have left the slide mount edges, the dust and converted to black and white.
The images feature the extremely bumpy gravel ring road. After the long drive, in our research vehicle from the US/NATO Keflavik airbase to the campsite in a field near the snout of Svinafellsjökull, I was still shaking hours later from the vibration. Two images are looking west towards this location (note no hotel/service station) and the others towards Breiðamerkurjökull.

I enjoyed my eventual return in 2017 but as expected, with the advent and rapid increase in tourism, as well as ice loss, Iceland had become a completely different world. My visit in 1979 is a very precious memory.