Notes from the places in the archive.

Notes from the places in the archive: short, human field notes on where these photographs were taken.

Walk past thirty of them in an afternoon · The Long Walk

• Six times prime minister, watching the palace he grew up in · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  On a small square off Tjarnargata stands Ólafur Thors, the shipping tycoon’s son who became Iceland’s prime minister six times, set to look across the pond toward the family palace at Fríkirkjuvegur 11.
• The steam still rising where the country began · Iceland · Field note · 4 min read
  On a downtown square ringed with restaurants stands a rough basalt pillar with a steel pipe rising beside it, breathing real steam, marking the exact spot where, by the old story, Ingólfur’s high seat pillars washed ashore and Reykjavík began.
• Two fishermen watching a sea that fed them and took them · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  By the old harbour stand two bronze fishermen in oilskins, one shading his eyes, one pointing out to sea: Looking Seawards, a monument to the trade that built the country and to the men it kept.
• The smoothest stones in Reykjavík · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  Along the Sæbraut seawall, a short run of boulders has been polished to a furniture shine among thousands of rough ones. A small green plaque is the only explanation offered.
• He stood here before the church did · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  The bronze Leif Eiríksson on his ship’s prow was a gift from the United States, and he had the hill to himself for thirteen years before anyone started building Hallgrímskirkja behind him.
• The man who faces the parliament · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  In the middle of Austurvöllur, Jón Sigurðsson stands on his column facing the parliament house: the scholar who led Iceland to independence without ever raising more than an argument.
• The first woman through the parliament’s door · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  Beside the Alþingi stands Ingibjörg H. Bjarnason, headmistress and suffragist, the first woman elected to Iceland’s parliament and the first named woman honoured with a full statue in Reykjavík.
• The oldest ground in Reykjavík · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  At the corner of a small park off Aðalstræti stand three stones with faint human figures carved into them, marking Víkurgarður, the churchyard where the town buried its dead for six centuries.
• The lighthouse by Höfði was born in 2019 · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  The bright yellow lighthouse on the viewing platform by Höfði looks like a survivor from the old harbour, and it was built in 2019 on purpose, to the pattern of the lights of 1917.
• The preacher Iceland read aloud for two hundred years · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  Beside Dómkirkjan a green bronze bishop in a ruff stands on a rough basalt pillar: Jón Vídalín, whose book of sermons was the loudest voice in Icelandic homes for two centuries.
• The priest the whole town greeted · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  By the cathedral door stands the bust of séra Bjarni Jónsson, who served Dómkirkjan for forty one years and was, for most of that time, the best known face in Reykjavík.
• The Wall came to the house where it began to fall · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  On the lawn by Höfði stands a painted slab of the Berlin Wall, sent to Reykjavík because the two men who started its fall met in the white house a few steps away.
• The cello outside Harpa has no strings · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  In the water on the harbour side of Harpa a bronze man bows a cello with no strings: Ólöf Pálsdóttir’s Musician, modelled on Erling Blöndal Bengtsson while he played for her.
• Why the sculpture at Höfði is called Öndvegissúlur · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  Sigurjón Ólafsson left this copper sculpture beside Höfði without a title in 1971. An art historian named it Öndvegissúlur, and in 1986 the whole world saw it on television.
• A harp for the wind, outside a hall called Harpa · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  On the square outside Harpa stands Himinglæva, Elín Hansdóttir’s stainless steel wave, an instrument with no player that hums when the wind moves through its strings.
• The king who handed Iceland its constitution · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  On the Government House lawn stands Christian IX of Denmark with one arm held out, offering the constitution he brought to Iceland in 1874, cast in bronze by Einar Jónsson.
• Iceland’s first minister stands outside his old office · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  On the other corner of the Government House lawn stands Hannes Hafstein, poet, sheriff and the first Icelander to govern Iceland, with the office he governed from at his back.
• The country is run from a house built as a prison · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A plain white house at the foot of Arnarhóll, raised in the 1760s as the country’s prison and now the seat of the Icelandic government, where the prime minister and cabinet still sit.
• The man Reykjavík still calls its father · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  In a small park off Aðalstræti, the oldest street in Reykjavík, stands the magistrate Skúli Magnússon, whose workshops turned the bay from a farm into a town.
• Breaking a spell, in the garden below Hallgrímskirkja · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  Behind the Einar Jónsson museum on the hill by Hallgrímskirkja, a bronze figure lowers his sword over a beaten shape in Úr álögum, the sculptor’s image of breaking free from a spell.
• The little yellow lighthouse at the mouth of the old harbour · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  Out at the end of a stone breakwater in Reykjavík’s old harbour stands a small, bright yellow lighthouse, marking the gap where the boats still slip in and out.
• A lava cairn on the waterfront, with a window cut for the mountain · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A dark, craggy bronze on the Reykjavík shore that almost everyone walks past on the way to the Sun Voyager, with an opening at its heart that keeps Mount Esja in view.
• The little cathedral where the parliament still goes to pray · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A small, plain church on Austurvöllur that most visitors walk straight past, and which is in fact the cathedral of Reykjavík, the one the parliament returns to before every session.
• The poet who tried to sell the northern lights · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A bronze figure of Einar Benediktsson stands beside Höfði on the Reykjavík shore, a poet and a dreamer of impossible schemes, set near a harp by the sculptor who thought him great at everything.
• The man on the hill, and the cove that became a city · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  A bronze settler with a spear and a high seat pillar on a low grassy hill in the centre of Reykjavík, looking out at the city he is said to have started.
• A broken boulder in front of parliament, and the year a country banged its pots · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  A heavy black cone driven into a boulder in the square in front of the Icelandic parliament, a memorial to the protests of 2009 and the right to refuse.
• Iceland has no unknown soldier, so it honoured this man instead · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  A man with a briefcase strides toward the City Hall, and where his head should be there is a block of raw basalt. A monument to the anonymous official, equal parts tribute and joke.
• Höfði, the white house where the Cold War began to end · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  A small white house on the Reykjavík shore where Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1986, older and stranger than the summit, and said to come with a ghost.
• Harpa, the glass hall that almost never opened · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  A great wall of coloured glass on the Reykjavík harbour that was left half built when the banks fell, and finished anyway as a sign the country was standing up again.
• Althingi, a parliament older than its house · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  A modest grey stone house on a Reykjavík square that holds a parliament first gathered in the year 930, with four guardian spirits carved above its windows.
• The Partnership, and the house just up the shore · Iceland · Field note · 2 min read
  Two bronze figures holding on to each other on the Reykjavík shore, a gift between two countries, set a short walk from the house where the Cold War began to thaw.
• Hallgrímskirkja, the church built to look like lava · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  The pale tower above Reykjavík took more than forty years to build, and its front was shaped to echo the basalt columns of the Icelandic coast.
• The Sun Voyager is not a Viking ship · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A gleaming steel boat on the Reykjavík waterfront that almost everyone reads as a Viking ship, and that its maker meant as something else entirely.
• The Water Carrier who waited years to stand · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A bronze woman near Lækjargata who carried water through the city long before the pipes arrived, and who waited years for Reykjavík to let her stand.
• Grótta Lighthouse, where the tide sets the schedule · Iceland · Field note · 3 min read
  A small white lighthouse at the western edge of Reykjavík that you can only reach on foot when the sea allows it.