Elysium Gallery and Espy Photography Award are pleased to announce Chris Rhodes as the People's Prize winner!
"My initial photography years were spent traveling around coastal England documenting county boundaries and the invisible lines that divided each metropolitan borough. During this journey my eye became drawn to the homes that were occupying these somewhat remote areas of the country. Since then the thin line between rural and urban settlements began fascinating me.
For this project ‘Frón’ I travelled to Iceland, one of the most remote Islands in Northern Europe. Iceland is surreal and somewhat unique in its peculiar mix of urban and rural culture. Its inhabitants have very much adapted to the hostile environment, living off fishing and agriculture, creating urban living situations within rather harsh elements.
The majority of Iceland’s population is found in the capital Reykjavik, housing two thirds of the country’s inhabitants. Circling Iceland is the national road Route 1, which connects the higher populated areas of Iceland. This road was only finished in 1974 and is the only road accessible for regular vehicles. It has therefore allowed for a faster development around the country and permitted a journey to the more remote towns, in order to see how there settlements differ from those I photographed in England.
Driving from Reykjavik with no real plan, I simply followed the only road I could follow. As soon as I as I had left the city it felt like landing on an undiscovered new world.
The title of the series, ‘Frón’ derives from the Old Norse word meaning ‘Land’. It serves the images by referencing back to the development of the country itself in both its cultural and visual character.
Indeed, each Icelandic construction reminds us of the history of the country: a land where Vikings settled in, and thrived to survive, only after one of them dreamt of an unexplored island, left to be conquered.
Cabin
(winning image)
The buildings are somehow ambiguous to our eyes. Tradition has carried forward to the modern day meaning the houses have unique character. The simple lines, colours and construction of these buildings allow for interesting, sometimes absurd, compositions. Our instinctive imaging of the place leaves us puzzled. Each town, in the form of early settlements, hosts the most necessary constructions of civilisation. Even the smallest villages, will provide the comfort of a church, a farm, or a harbour. Are we walking through the homes of people surviving within and from their land, or are we in the presence of a very basic but organised urban culture developing in unexpected areas?
The house is one of the most personal and strangely intimate details of a person. Photographed at a respectful distance, it allows the viewer a completely voyeuristic but personal and unassuming view of the inhabitants. A house tells a story, it lives and breathes with the occupants. It’s man’s earliest form of shelter. To me the creation of a home within a harsh wild environment is really what recalls the notion of ‘home’: as the origin of the settlement of humans within a great and powerful nature they can’t measure themselves with. It is to remind the 18th century philosophy of the sublime as the space to contemplate nature and understand how its infinity relates to men.
The 5 images selected from my series ‘Frón’ aim to embody the ambiguity of a land facing modernisation but effortlessly recalling its origins, in the visual aspect of its development and the unique feel of its unusual environment. These documentary images reflect mans ever present effect on the landscape creating possible urban spaces in the most rural type of environments, where even in the remotest parts of the world, Man is still present and surviving the roughest conditions, anxious to own the land."
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