Ef ég hefdi verid … Reykjavic 1950-1970
Nina Zurier
Crymogea
English and Icelandic
Hardcover
156 pages
210 x 270 mm
2015
ISBN 9789935420572
What if our childhood memories were really false? That we don’t actually have the memories we think we have? That our lives had actually been lived elsewhere, in another country, with other people?
In the book ”If I Had Been…” Nina Zurier creates an autobiography as if she hadn’t grown up in the Midwestern States, but in Reykjavik. As if during her adolescence she had traveled around Iceland and participated in what others participated in from 1950 to 1970, whether it was horse racing at Fákur, working at the school parks in Laugardalur or football games in the Westman Islands. What if? In order to create this new biography, Nina used material from the Reykjavík Museum of Photography, taken by various photographers in Iceland in the sixties and sixties of the twentieth century. The pictures depict everyday life in Iceland in the postwar years and the choice is based on the author’s view of how her life could have been. Her memory—the false but at the same time true— of a life she knows she never lived, is shown through the interplay of the original image and an enlargement from it that shows the details of the image as the reality of the dream. It is a story in pictures that is at once both an unreal autobiography and the story of Iceland, a snapshot of a lost world. The book was published in connection with an exhibition in the Reykjavík Museum of Photography, which opened in October 2015.
About the Artist
[pending]
About the Publisher
From the publisher;
”Crymogea is a publishing house in Reykjavík, Iceland that operates a shop and showroom at Barónsstígur 27 in Reykjavík, Iceland, and has a distribution network in Europe, Asia and America. At Crymogea we believe that books are a way to understand, enjoy and experience everything that art, photography and design have to offer; The rich and magnificent world of pictures. Historical value, permanence and beauty are combined in books in order for us to learn to appreciate what is a good photograph, influential art, extraordinary artists, a well composed building and beautiful design. We work with excellent photographers, eminent artists and brilliant designers, people who are front-running in their field. In that way, and in that way only, we can assure that the public is presented with books wherein beauty resides. Our guiding light is simple: Never to compromise in our demands. Always aim for the best. This is how we can provide our customers worldwide with the best possible.”
Crymogea.is
