“An aerial photo, an immediate feeling of naturalness, of amazing experience. Seeing from a bird’s perspective is not consistent with seeing from the ground. It took you quite some time to be able to condense information from such a large scale of vision and when you fly and take photographs, shadows lift objects from the ground, allowing the viewer to be drawn into the photograph as if going beyond the real to the more real. I got in touch with a pilot in Iceland that I worked with very closely and I mainly used an ultralight aircraft, so I could fly much slower and lower allowing me to take my pictures without the orientation of the horizon. When I arrived, the pilot told me we were about to fly over a peculiar area in Iceland. I’d been travelling and taking pictures in Iceland for several years, but I’d never seen anything like it in my life and just kept photographing the event.” — Massimo Lupidi

Iceland is an elemental place, a primordial world on the morning of Creation, a place where the very bones of the earth are manifest. Raw, starkly beautiful, otherworldly, yet also unmistakably terrestrial, it’s a dizzying, breathtaking escape into an earth untouched by man. In the introduction to his hardcover book, Iceland: Visions of Earth (Sassi, 2017), Italy’s Massimo Lupidi says, “Suddenly what was far away becomes close, what was impossible becomes possible, what was a dream becomes reality.” And his glorious photographs make those words palpable, startling…revelatory. Some impressionistic images (as on the book’s cover) with a swirl of soil and water are interesting; but the lion’s share of the book is devoted to landscapes — and they are glorious, achingly so. Lupidi’s images quicken the soul, just as Iceland does. His book has short bits of poetry by Sigurbjorg Thrastardóttir. One of them captures the wild spirit of this place, where the imagination becomes tangible: “…and the cliffs from his bones / and the rocks from / his teeth, the trees from / his hair and the sea from his blood…” (from “Homemade,” or “The Creation of the World from the Body of Ýmir”). This captivating book makes us yearn to return to Iceland, a place, as Lupidi says, which is “fabulously beyond our wildest imaginings: a natural wonder forged by fire and tempered by ice.”

The photographic imagination is also filtered through painting and its creative processes.

Terms such as fields, spatiality, bird’s-eye view, aerial view, geometric perspective, colour blends, shades, shadows, colour ratio, evocative, abstract art, all take on meaning. If we look down on Iceland from on high, we can relish the natural masterpieces crafted by the Greatest Artist.

By literally changing our point of view, we also change the scope of our understanding and our perception of the environment around us – of this living land, of this world apart. From the ground, the eternal interplay of colour and light of this ever-changing remote land provides an inexhaustible source of artistic creation. Looking down from above, we see unnatural colours, shimmering waterways, jagged coastlines and abstract patterns.

The great washes of colour created by Nature herself. The sublime and the imaginary – we are moved to new emotions by the extraordinary event that Mother Nature is allowing to unfold before our eyes. The scenery is transformed. From above, the exploring eye turns dreams into creative photographs.

These images explore the relationship of the land with the ocean surrounding it, the life that thrives on it and the water that makes it habitable, as a way of opening our eyes to a new way of seeing the familiar.