You are the Weather

Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975, when she was still in her teens. She immediately became fascinated by the rawness of the landscape, the intense and unpredictable weather conditions and the solitude of the island. That fascination found artistic expression in multiple books of drawings, texts and photos, with images including hardened lava flows, abandoned sheep pens, roiling bodies of water and tranquil, almost Edenic thermal pools. The photo series You are the Weather probably also stems from Horn’s long-term relationship with this unique landscape and how it is reflected in people.

This series consists of one hundred portraits, both colour and black and white, of the same woman. Horn took the pictures in the summer of 1994 while travelling across Iceland with an Icelandic woman named Margrét. She took close-up photographs of her subject’s face while Margrét stood in various thermal pools fed by natural hot springs.

You are the Weather offers an intimate viewing experience. Time and again, Margrét gazes directly at the viewer, her image life-sized and presented at eye level. Her face remains the same and yet changes every time: her expression, her skin, the drops of water, the light falling across her features. Sometimes we see her squinting in the sunlight, while other times she looks straight into the lens. While her emotions and personality remain elusive, the weather is consistently visible – You are the Weather.

The photographs are more than portraits of an individual. They capture an intense experience unfolding at a certain time in a specific location. Margrét is there, surrounded by the elements, while we are here. Yet thanks to the large format and the direct way in which her portrait is presented, which invites careful and attentive viewing, that distance seems to vanish. The viewer becomes first-hand witness to an intimate moment between photographer and subject that took place in an Icelandic bathing pool decades ago.