...now | Páll Stefánsson

...now is the title of an exhibition at Reykjavík Museum of Photography with photos by the Icelandic Photographer Páll Stefánsson.

"After thirty-seven years as a traveller and photographer, it’s the silence that is most memorable. The howling silence in the endless wilds of the Vatnajökull glacier. The oppressive silence of Cox‘s Bazar in Bangladesh, where half a million refugees had lost the ability to speak.

I’m not looking back: this show is about the present, the moments I am capturing here and now. Refugees on the move, a fast-flowing river that moves inexorably on. A woman half-hidden behind a tussock or hillock. A hillock that becomes a mountain. A fine-looking man who has nothing. Not even a future.

If a place captivates me, I seize the moment.... now.

... now, is that the moment when you step out of the lift and enter this place? Or is it that tiny moment when you notice this word, now?

... now can of course be about a person or a landscape, that I freeze with my camera and bring in here….

And the land, the landscape that belongs to all of us, and the light that doesn’t discriminate….

… but I want to show discrimination too: people fleeing for their lives.

We can’t change the light. But we can all move mountains, with sympathy and kindness – and right now. Yes …. now."

Páll Stefánsson was born just south of the Arctic Circle, in the Öxarfjörður district of north Iceland, in 1958. He studied photography in Sweden in the last century, 1979-82, and is now a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador. Páll has published 37 books, which include images of the neighboring mountains, as well of a Coptic girl in Alexandria and of long shadows on the yellow sands in Önundarfjörður in Iceland’s West Fjords.

 For more information about Páll Stefánsson see https://imagingambassadors.sony.net/ambassadors/pall-stefansson/