Where the Church Came From

The walk up from Skaftafell takes about three quarters of an hour and gives you nothing until the last corner, which I now think is deliberate on the landscape’s part.

Then the amphitheatre opens and it’s all columns. Basalt that cooled slowly enough to crack into hexagons, stacked in ranks across the whole curve of the cliff, and where they overhang the falls they have snapped off at different lengths and hang down like broken pipes. The water itself is thin — this is not a big waterfall, and in September it was a single rope of white against all that black — but nobody comes here for the volume. You come for the wall behind it.

The birch was going yellow, which put the only warm colour in the frame. Everything else was black rock, grey water and the dark pool at the bottom full of the columns that have already come down.

The thread

Here is the part I didn’t expect to still be thinking about six days later.

Guðjón Samúelsson, who was Iceland’s state architect for most of the first half of the twentieth century, took this — columnar basalt, ranks of it, stepping up — and made it the front of Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. And the tower at Akureyri. And once you have stood in front of the real thing, you cannot unsee it: those churches are not abstract modernism at all, they are a national landscape rendered in poured concrete.

A country with almost no building stone and almost no timber went and copied its own cliffs.

I photographed the cliff on day two and the cathedral on day seven without planning it that way, and the two frames turned out to be the same picture in different materials. That, more than any single ruin, is what this trip ended up being about.