RESTLICHT BERND NICOLAISEN

Glaciers, volcanoes, and caverns: the Swiss photographer Bernd Nicolaisen compiled unique images of these features of the landscape in the pictures he took in Iceland between 2004 and 2015. He paid special attention to the Breiðamerkurjökull, a glacial lobe of the Vatnajökull located in the southeast of the country, a place he visited several times and observed extensively. Much time was spent on capturing aspects of the glacier with an eight-byten- inch large-format camera. His photography, initially in analogue before progressing to digital, requires a lot of time and effort to “transform what is basic into what is unique.”

The pictures depict nature in a seemingly untouched and magical way, and often appear to be images from a remote planet, showing places of solitude, silence, melancholia, and even spirituality. In his conceptual design of natural forms, human intervention rarely, if ever, becomes apparent. No humans, creatures, or signs of civilization are portrayed, so that the sublime, wild, and pristine qualities in the grandiose nature of glaciers, arctic sea, and mountain ranges can be appreciated. Abstract shapes invite the spectator to behold and linger.

Nothing is staged, yet the images achieve a virtually radiant magic. They show the magnitude and majestic dignity of glaciers, composed into seemingly uneventful panels of stillness and calm. Monochrome tones and detailed surface structures appear, sometimes in captivating colors, ranging from surreal deep blue to shiny turquoise and sometimes fine hues of gray. Spectacular formations and the smallest lines and shapes are visible, and tiny details appear as ornaments in the high resolution and perfect quality of the pictures, which Nicolaisen develops and prints himself. Nicolaisen’s Restlicht photographs show the juxtaposition of opposing elements — ice and lava — in caves of a thousand years of glacial ice formation.

CATALOG
Bernd Nicolaisen – Restlicht
Photographs – Tableaux – Lightboxes - 2004-2015, Iceland

Foreword by Prof. Klaus Honnef, with texts by Dr. Andrea Henkens, Andreas Staeger, Christoph Sigrist and Stephan Reisner, 2015.
Design: Walter Stähli, Phorbis
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
German / English. 192 Pages, 103 Images 245 x 295 cm hardback
ISBN 978-3-7757-4061-6