Interiors

“Useful pictures don’t start from ideas. They start from seeing.” Robert Adams Orri Jónsson was holidaying one summer in the north of Iceland with his family, when he stumbled upon an abandoned farmhouse and began taking photos of it. Fascinated with the results but disappointed by the restrictions of the 35 mm film he had used, he returned to the motif with a large-format analogue camera. Orri thus photographed the gloriously decaying interiors of deserted houses throughout Iceland for the next twelve years, and Interiors contains the best of these images from 1999 to 2010. Painterly in colour, rigorous in composition and lacking people, Orri’s photos evoke the personal histories of the inhabitants who long ago abandoned their homes. Interiors is shaped by an uncanny silence and sense of loss, most poignant in the images of objects people left behind – old buttons, newspapers and even a hot water bottle – tokens of vanished lives. Orri Jónsson was born in Reyjavík in 1970, and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1996. Orri’s photographs have been published in magazines including Big magazine, and he has exhibited at institutions including the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Reykjavík Museum of Photography. Orri is also an accomplished musician and producer; his albums as half of the duet Slowblow include Quicksilver Tuna (1994) and Noi Albinoi (2004). In 2011 Orri co-wrote, directed and edited his first film Grandma Lo-Fi: The Basement Tapes of Sigríður Níelsdóttir. produziert hat.