Iceland Wintertide

“David Freese has traveled the globe considering our planet—its waterways, coastlines, and natural and built environments. His work is revelatory, with an insistence on unique perspectives that examine place. His newest effort, Iceland Wintertide, reflects those same efforts, but this time he captures obscured landscapes covered in snow and ice in heroic geologic and atmospheric vistas. His palette of desaturated winter colors reveals a humbling magnificence. Yet Freese also reminds us, in the shadow of such remarkable beauty, of the fragility of our earthly environments in the midst of climate change.” ~Aline Smithson, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Lenscratch

"Iceland Wintertide is a cinematic ode to the vastness of Icelandic land, sea, and skyscapes. The muted tonalities give all the information we need to realize how ephemeral things are—global warming has caused Iceland's glaciers to lose seven percent of their surface (290 square miles/751 square kilometers) since the turn of the millennium. David Freese's elegant documentation of this Arctic region gives us the contemplative space to understand the responsibilities we ideally carry." ~Laura Moya, Director Photolucida

"Looking at David Freese's images of Iceland reminds me that the longest season is full of surprises. Like a sea full of blue ice, a red roofed church in a blizzard, a tiny horse and rider under the heaviest sky, a frozen waterfall, a plowed road cutting through the land, a glimpse of a lake beneath cliffs made soft by snow conjuring up a Georgia O'Keefe painting of Lake George. I look again and again at the pictures and I don't just imagine that I am transported to this otherworldly landscape, I can actually hear the muffled sounds and the strange quiet that comes with the weight of winter. The experience of looking at these photographs is enough." ~Ann Jastrab, Executive Director, Center for Photographic Art

"In an intriguing way, David Freese's color photographs of Iceland's black-and-white wintertide enclose many dimensions of time. They store the time of the past, which can be associated with the timelessness of nature without man and manifests itself in horizontal layers of volcanic rock, stacked on top of each other, windswept mountains with contrasting personal traits, black lava fields, and tree twigs protruding through the snow. But they also capture the present with fenceposts and power lines, a red roof under a powder-blue sky and a blue tractor, a few trees planted by a farm and a village snuggling under a steep mountain. In Freese's photographs people are like little black strokes, the size of matches, under an immense sky. They not only remind us that nature is bigger than man, but also that, although man cannot survive without nature, nature can cope perfectly well without man." ~Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Novelist, Poet, and Playwright