American photo artist Zack Seckler has shot a series of abstract photographs of Iceland that blur the line between reality and artistic invention.
Drawing on his previous experience of aerial photography over the African plains, Seckler sought out striking compositions in the most remote and inaccessible regions of the land of ice.
Zack Seckler was born in Boston and studied psychology in Syracuse, though he quickly lost interest in it. He moved to New York and turned to shooting humorous commercial photography, for which he has received numerous awards.
He has been a multiple laureate of the international IPA photography competition, and in 2016 he received two Cannes Lions awards. His current clients include Apple, Google, Procter & Gamble, GQ and Harper's BAZAAR. His work has been covered by some of the world's most prominent publications, among them Architectural Digest, CNN and, of course, Losko Magazine.
Zack discovered photography during a trip to India, where he found that making images had become a gateway to understanding both culture and himself. His love of aerial landscape photography was also ignited by chance. While on assignment in Botswana, he found himself with a few free days, which he spent photographing the African wilderness from a small, agile aircraft.
The aerial shoot in Iceland took place in difficult weather conditions — hurricane season was approaching, and flying far from the coastline was all but impossible.
"The last straw for me was learning that the pilot had built his own plane," Zack Seckler admits.
Yet the bad weather and the pilot's admission did not deter the photographer, and we are left with a rare chance to admire one of the world's most frequently photographed countries from an unusual vantage point. At first glance there seems to be nothing but the blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean, but look more closely and you can make out seals, seabirds and the pattern the wind draws across the surface of the water.
Zack Seckler's photographs are clean and minimalist, abstract and almost elusive. They resemble one another yet are strikingly unlike anything we are accustomed to seeing of Iceland: there are no fjords, no glaciers, no snowbound, boundless plains of that austere Viking land.
All photographs and rights belong to © Zack Seckler
If you would like to continue your visual journey through Iceland, take a look at the extraordinary photographs of the desolate Kerlingarfjöll mountains in Brendan Lynch's photography project, as well as the local landscapes of the land of ice by Joel Tettamanti.
