Nordic Sagas 

Snowstorms, volcanic backdrops, and arctic surf-hunting with the Icelandic photographer.
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About five years ago, I met Elli Thor Magnusson in his hometown of Reykjavík, Iceland. He was an enigma to my friends and I, who were there working as journalists. He was a surfer, which is an insane thing for an Icelandic person to be. He’s incredibly soft-spoken, but can recommend Icelandic writers, explain the sagas, and how the country’s roads were mapped with consideration for the gnomes and fairies believed to be living in certain mounds of the country’s volcanic earth. 

His home is a cabin on the edge of a lake, a shell of an A-frame that he’s turned into any traveler’s dream crash pad—roofing it, siding it, and plumbing it himself. And he is a photographer, which I intentionally list last here because, these days, everyone is a photographer. 

Heidar Logi (pictured) is Iceland’s only professional surfer. We do a lot of trips together—he’s the only person good enough to surf the heavier waves here. This is a beachbreak on the south coast that usually isn’t very big, but for two weeks it turned into an impression of Western Australia. After that the bars disappeared.
I was on a trip in Greenland where we hiked up a glacier and camped for nine days. There are polar bears there, so we had to keep the food far from our tents—and we had to have guns. One night, we heard lots of rattling and weird noises. The crew started freaking out, thinking it was a polar bear. Fortunately, it turned out to be this little fox. He came back to the camp everyday looking for food.
The biggest glacier in Iceland sits along the southeast coast. In the summer, the ice at the top melts and runs through the bulk of the glacier like rivers, forming caves. In the fall, when it starts to get cold again, we like to explore them. They’re outlet caves that change every year, and some are almost a kilometer long. Sometimes, the outlets form little river mouths along the coast, and the waves get fun around them.
In 2010, an Icelandic volcanic eruption led to the largest air traffic closures in Europe since WWII. This was the volcano just beforehand. We drove up in diesel trucks and spent the night. It was surreal standing in front of the thing. I could feel the earth shaking. We could’ve walked as close to the lava as we wanted, but there was a wall of heat that stopped us from going any further. It was like a force field.

Still, very few are like Elli and, for him, photography is the thing that ties everything else together. His archive documents years of surfing in Iceland, where the water temperature can dip to 35-degrees Fahrenheit, and ocean currents are notoriously dangerous. It tells a much bigger story than Elli is likely to relay in words. 

“I grew up in nature, unafraid of bad weather,” he says. “My parents have been members of the rescue team here for 30 years and if the weather’s crazy, they just go. I couldn’t live in a place where the weather is nice all the time. It’s something that I actually need, not just like. When I started surfing here, the wetsuits weren’t good, it was cold and miserable, and not the best place to learn. The weather is crazy with currents and stormy surf, but I just fell in love with it. There was no one doing it.”

The image of surfing in Iceland is that it’s always cold. But the spring, summer, and fall have mild weather. We do a lot of camping and driving looking for waves. It’s not all misery and snowstorms.
Tróndur Patursson is an artist who lives in the Faroe Islands. His glass sculptures and paintings hang all over the world. I met him while on assignment for a magazine, and then later I went and stayed with him for a week. He has a house he built himself out of wood, right next to the sea. The house is like a piece of art itself.
The Vikings brought horses over in the 9th century. If you take them out of Iceland you can’t legally bring them back, because they’ve never been mixed with other breeds. The horses roam around on big pieces of land, so it’s common to see them on the trails, and even on the beach. I saw this one while hiking to look for surf. He made this face the whole time. I think he was demented.
This looks like a typical beach fire, but it’s actually shot in the middle of the night. Iceland has 24 hours of sunlight in the summer. Even though we get less swell, an all-day window keeps things interesting, as long as the wind is good. I surf at 3 a.m. all the time.

Initially Elli’s interest in photography grew from his love of skating and snowboarding. 

“When I was about six years old, my family went to Berlin to visit my aunt,” he says. “While we were there I saw some punks on skateboards and I just thought it was so fucking cool. My parents bought me my first skateboard then and there.” 

He started snowboarding when he was nine, and collected every skate and snowboard magazine he could find. 

“Living in Iceland,” he says, “you wouldn’t have access to those magazines. So when I’d manage to get some I’d read them again and again and again. There’s so much photography in those magazines, and I think that’s seriously when I really got interested in it. Not just in the actual sports, but in the whole thing. It’s nice to see a pretty photograph—but I always loved seeing more of the story, behind the scenes. Those magazines were my first introduction to that. They had an influence.”

Tyler Warren in the Faroe Islands. This was one of the first real surf trips I went on. These islands are halfway between Iceland and Scotland, and the people speak a similar language to Icelandic. We ended up being there for two weeks, and only got one or two days of good surf. Tyler made the most of it.
I’ve traveled a lot of places to surf and shoot, but in Iceland it feels like a totally different activity. You drive for six hours and end up in the middle of nowhere. You won’t see another person all day. Rarely will you ever see anyone else in the water. When I started, there were probably eight or 10 people total who surfed here. It’s still such a new thing.
Part of the fun in Iceland is finding waves no one has ever surfed before. We found this wave about six years ago. It’s in a really deep bay, and it needs a huge swell to even get head high, but it’s as perfect as any wave in the world. It’s like a smaller, reverse Skeleton Bay.
“When humans have made a whole lot of progress, they start to get bored. Then they talk again to the weather and the flowers and the stones, and they listen again to the singing of the stars.” [Thorbergur Thordarson]

He experimented with his father’s film camera, but was always leaving the rolls in hotel rooms or refrigerators, unprocessed. Then, at 21, Elli traveled to Nepal on a kayaking trip with his buddies, and bought his first digital SLR while he was there. He remembers the digital camera feeling like the start of something, and he spent his time in Nepal documenting that trip while getting to know its functions. Looking back at the photos, he found there were few images of the actual kayaking they’d done. Instead he’d mostly captured his friends in that electrified time of life that comes at that age—between the freedom of adolescence and the responsibilities of adulthood—exploring the beauty and remoteness of Nepal, connecting to each other along the way. He says they weren’t very good photographs. It is just like Elli to say that.

Back in Iceland, he spent a few years assisting a commercial advertising photographer. Then he went to the U.K. to study photography at Falmouth University, a degree he wasn’t able to finish after the Icelandic economy crashed and the value of the Króna plummeted. 

When he returned, it was to a country—once too expensive for most people to visit—suddenly finding itself on the brink of a tourism explosion. In no time, Elli was booking work for travel companies, photographing Iceland’s unique landscapes and tourism opportunities for websites and brochures. This new wave of travel, along with the country’s stunning geography, caught the eye of international outdoors and extreme sports brands. Elli started booking work around the lifestyles and communities that had sparked his love of photography in the first place. His career took off. 

“Cold-water surfing was a new frontier and getting more popular, and I got put on the radar,” he says. “Those were the jobs that I really loved working.”

Timmy Reyes. Iceland’s coastal landscape makes it so easy to get a good photograph. I’m very fortunate to have that. Sometimes I have to make an effort to not get a giant, snow covered mountain in every backdrop. There are so many different angles and perspectives to get of the waves. We get crazy light as well. Because of how long the days are in the warmer months, the golden “hour” is more like six.
Even though it’s geographically close, Greenland is like a totally different planet compared to Iceland. Greenland is made up almost entirely out of glaciers. It’s beautiful, and one of the last proper wildernesses on Earth. The elements are so harsh, and much of the land that isn’t along the coast is inhospitable.

After collaborating with him for several years, I am still amazed by the depth and quality of images he’s able to capture. Because he comes from the land and the culture he documents, he absorbs the environment and the atmosphere, mixes it with his own history and knowledge of the place, and then somehow filters everything into his images. The stories his photos tell are rich in detail and thick with feeling—the white-knuckle fear of driving through bad weather on snow-drifted roads, the learned patience of Icelandic surfers who can read volatile conditions for the right signals, the elated high of coming in after a good session, the carefree middle-of-the-night-hot-tub-with-friends-got-nowhere-to-be-tomorrow aftermath.“Honestly it’s almost a different sport here,” Elli says. “And there are still so many opportunities to explore and find waves and discover something. The solitude, the weather—the actual surfing is maybe 30 percent of it. The driving, camping, trying to find waves, dealing with snowstorms—those are as important for me as the actual act of riding waves. There’s no map. There’s no guidebook. The forecasting sites don’t work here. I believe we still have a deep connection to nature and a basic need for it. It’s good to have a little bit of struggle.”

We have a saying in Iceland that goes, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.” Sometimes it can work against you, like when a snowstorm hits out of nowhere, or it can switch the winds to just the right direction.
As far into the wild as some of the spots are, some of the best are just like anywhere else—right off of the highway.
Some visiting surfers expect a lot. Most don’t expect much, and those are the ones who usually get it the best. Still, even I wasn’t expecting to ever find waves like this here. Every time we find a setup like this in Iceland, we wonder if it’s a spot that will only be like that once every four years. This one has a little bit of consistency.

[Feature image: This mountain has been shot quite a few times, but usually from the other slope. I know the farmer who owns the property on this side, and he lets me drive over his land. Getting to the waves takes miles of driving over the beach, which is always covered with about an inch of water. It’s tough to negotiate, but it gives the place this mirror effect.]

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