01:20

31 nights, 31 pictures

Ólafsfjörður is a fishing village in North Iceland. Like many Icelandic villages it consists of houses with roofs made of corrugated sheets, a church in the harbor, a few shops, a petrol station, a fish factory, a swimming pool and a school. All of this is surrounded by snowy mountaintops, rivers that meander through valleys, the sea crashing against cliffs and sheep in the hills. One of the remarkable things in Iceland is that the sun doesn’t set during summer. Because of Ólafsfjörður’s northern orientation the sun touches the horizon on the first of July and goes immediately back up again after that. The sun sinks more and more the following days until the nights return. This book visualizes this change in light: These 31 images, each taken at 01:20 AM, represent the darkest moment of every day in the month of July. At the same time, 01:20 is also a documentary about a small fishing village, seclusion and everyday life, romance and roughness – an alternative to today’s globalized world.

Bastiaan van Aarle (*1988, Belgium) is a conceptual landscape photographer who works around questions of the human influence on the landscape, the concept of time in photography and the two-dimensionality of the medium.

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