The whole Icelandic nation in one face: Ragnar Axelsson’s best photograph | Art and design

I first met Guðjón Þorsteinsson through my work as a photographer for the Icelandic daily newspaper Morgunblaðið. He and his older brother, Óskar, ran a farm above the peninsula of Dyrhólaey, a couple of hours’ drive from Reykjavík. A raging storm had broken lots of power lines so the farm had no electricity. I’d heard the brothers were having to milk their cows by hand and thought I might be able to get a good picture for the paper.

When Guðjón opened the door, he just said: “What do you want?” He wasn’t very friendly, though I sensed this was an act. He invited me in for coffee and I ended up getting the shots I wanted, but after they ran in the paper, someone complained that the cows looked dirty and they were taken away. Feeling it was my fault, I went back to the farm to apologise. Guðjón said: “I’m glad – I didn’t want to milk them anyway.”

We became friends, and I would always stop if I was travelling past his home. On the day this was taken, in 1995, we were walking on the black volcanic beach below the farm with Guðjón’s dog, Gái. Guðjón was looking for a mink that had been killing his eider ducks. There was a moody atmosphere, it was windy and there was salty spray flying everywhere. Dyrhólaey has a huge rock arch that you can see in the background here. I had a plane and had once flown through that hole in the cliff with a friend. Óskar wasn’t impressed by that – he said we’d encourage others to try to do the same and they’d kill themselves.

When I looked at Guðjón, it was like seeing a whole nation in one face, right back to the Vikings. He was kind of angry that day, concentrating on finding the mink, and I was able to photograph him off guard, which is what I’d wanted. This moment just happened. He was distracted and being completely himself. I saw the shot and managed to catch the waves in the background hitting the rocks.

The photograph kind of breaks the rules of framing, but it works. It was a turning point in my career. Until I took it, I felt a little like Robinson Crusoe stuck on my island. I’d try to interest editors and publishers in my work outside Iceland and they didn’t want to know. But even now, whenever I have exhibitions, curators want to include farmer Guðjón. I carried on visiting him until his death in 2006, when he was 81. I still took photos but not many, because I felt I had already captured him. I often talk about this picture in terms of songs: this was my Yesterday, and I wasn’t going to top Yesterday. I wanted to move on to my Let It Be, my Hey Jude and my Here Comes the Sun.

The image opened doors for Guðjón, too. Once his face became known, he was hired for some advertisements and as an actor in a couple of movies. After doing one of them, he called me and said: “I have money for you.” He couldn’t believe how much they’d paid him. I told him: “It’s your money, not mine.” He was very happy about it, because by that stage his brother had died and he’d been living alone for a while, so he was kind of lonely and glad to have something to do. They’d made a great double-act, those brothers. Sometimes I went there just to listen to them argue. It was so much fun: they were like the two old guys in the balcony seats on The Muppet Show.

I worked for the Morgunblaðið for 44 years and only left in 2020, to concentrate fully on documenting people in the Arctic regions and the effect the climate crisis is having on their ways of life. I’ve been visiting these places for decades and photographed generations of families. As with Guðjón, I find the best pictures happen when I’ve become so familiar that these friends of mine forget what I’m doing. Then I can photograph them like I’m not really there.

Ragnar Axelsson’s CV