The Prologue to a Photobook

The two weakest photographs in the photobook are from the inside of a volcano.

How can that even be? A setting so unique that most people I will ever meet have never, and likely will never, be able to say they had that experience. It must be a travel photographer's dream, and produce the shot of a lifetime.

I sat with this thought a lot while editing these pictures. It was difficult to understand why they felt inadequate, you can see the light from the shaft activating the intricate colour interplay of the different minerals in the rocks, our faces happy beyond measure in the selfie I decided to include. Even the videos I took of the water droplets splashing onto the rocks and singing their songs felt inadequate. Nothing fit the experience of descending into the heart of a volcano that erupted over four thousand years ago. But I included them. I knew I had to, because leaving out the part where we literally stood inside a volcano in a photobook about Iceland felt like a lie, even if including them was its own kind of failure.

I struggled with that a lot while sitting with these pictures, which is probably why it took me over a year to edit and share them. Several months after first holding the finished book in my hands, teary-eyed, I realise what the heart of it actually is: not the perfect journey (and let's be honest, it was perfect), not white balance or noise reduction, not even trying to capture the sense of scale and solitude. Not even the decision of whether to edit the northern lights pictures down to reflect what my eyes actually saw, versus bringing out what the camera captured. No. The real question, the one I kept returning to in Lightroom at 11pm with a glass of wine in front of me, was simpler and harder than any of that: what do you owe to an experience that defeats you?