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MCCC Displays Slices of Iceland

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Evelyn Short’s review from the Lansdale Reporter about John Welsh’s exhibit of Icelandic images at Montgomery County Community College.


THE LANSDALE REPORTER, June 2007

By Evelyn Short

The “raging river” is contained not by grassy banks, but by tall chiseled-looking gray rocks. Because there are no homes, trees or people, the expansive wall of old lava looks like part of a canyon that could be several stories tall.

“It’s a stream that’s coming down from a glacier, and it found its way down the mountain,” said John Welsh, who photographed the scene. “It’s cut through the rock.”
The rock actually rises only about 4 or 5 feet above the water, and it is a smaller slice of the overall landscape.

It is one of 34 panoramic images of Iceland that Welsh has on display in a solo exhibit at Montgomery County Community College. The photographs are a selection from 8,000 images he took during seven trips to the country.

“I’ve never been there and the pictures make me want to go,” said Holly Cairns, director of The Multiple Choice Gallery. “It looks more inviting than I thought it would from seeing the photographs.”

With a name like Iceland people mistakenly think that it is a country of solid ice.

But, Iceland is an island about the same size as Ohio, with a population of 300,000. It has more than 10,000 waterfalls, hot springs and the coastline has fjords and green, fertile valleys. Despite its name, only 11 percent of the country is covered by glaciers. A good portion of the country is uninhabitable, with moss-covered rocks from old lava flows, according to the Icelandic Tourist Board.

Welsh discovered Iceland by following his sense of curiosity. In the early 1990s he visited Mexico. While there, he met some people from Denmark and became curious about Scandinavia. In 1993 he spent the summer in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. While traveling by train he found himself reading about Iceland and wanting to learn more. In 2001 he took his first trip to Iceland. The more he went and showed people his photographs, the more their interest fueled his desire to photograph more of the country.


“This is my 20th year as a photographer and I’ve never shown until the past few years,” Welsh said. “I was always working for newspapers and doing commercial work. Doing exhibits is new for me.”

At the opening reception for the exhibit on Saturday, Welsh fielded questions from people about the country and its landscapes.
“They were just amazed that this is what Iceland looks like,” Welsh said.

For those, who missed talking with Welsh at the reception, people can read the text mounted next to each photograph in which Welsh describes how he stumbled upon the scene and felt at the time he captured that moment in time.

“Around me steaming vents vented sulfurous clouds that disappeared into isolation,” Welsh wrote about his image Leirhnjúkshraun, which shows peaks of old blackened lava rock covered with patches of snow. It was taken in an active volcanic area in northern Iceland.

The title of each photograph is an Icelandic name relating to the place. Many of the scenes were visible from the road on which he was traveling and were close to cities.
“For some I had to spend a lot of time hiking,” Welsh said. “These are places you find along the way to somewhere else. They’re not in guidebooks.”

The Multiple Choice Gallery is in the library on the second floor of College Hall at Montgomery County Community College, 340 DeKalb Pike, in Whitpain. The exhibition runs through Aug 11. Admission is free. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, plus some evenings and Saturdays depending on the summer class schedule. For more information about the exhibit or hours, contact Holly Cairns at hcairns@mc3.edu or call (215) 619-7349.


Look at Iceland Through His Eyes

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Anne Minicozzi of Main Line Life on John Welsh’s travels to Iceland and his documentation of the country.


MAIN LINE LIFE, March 2007

By Anne Minicozzi

“Many people find geothermal areas to be hellish, but I find them to be entertaining and a welcome sign of life.”
John Welsh regarding the “Gunnuhver” photograph.

Usually, when you attend an event in Radnor, you see John Welsh, a long-time local photojournalist, taking photos. However, at an event last Friday, it was John Welsh himself who was the featured artist.

Feb. 23 marked the opening of Welsh’s exhibit, “Icelandic Travels,” held in the gallery in the Connelly Center on the Villanova University Campus. The exhibit is composed of thirty-four photographs culled from over 8,000 images taken during seven trips to Iceland in the past five years.

What can compel a man who has been a photographer of people for 20 years to become a landscape photographer? Welsh and I talked recently, and he says it is the landscape of Iceland that he found so compelling. Initially, Welsh was drawn to Iceland more by curiosity than by intention. While traveling in 1993 in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, he became curious about Iceland from reading about descriptions of the country in guidebooks.

Winter 2001 marked his first brief visit there, but in spring 2002 he returned. In that season he began wandering the rugged terrain and empty spaces just beyond the borders of the small settlement towns and started taking photographs.

“To a visitor, it is the landscape which speaks with the loudest voice,” said Welsh in a 2006 Canadian newspaper interview. Iceland is a notable location on the planet because it is where the European and North American tectonic plates collide. If there is any news of a planetary nature to be found, what better location might a journalist be drawn to than to where the landscape is being made and remade?


Welsh is a photographer/journalist by perspective, and brings that same honest, fresh lens to his artistic work too. We talked a little about how he presents the landsacpes in the exhibit. Metaphorically speaking his technique melds with the geographic dominance of the landscape because he employs a layering technique when exhibiting his work.

Welsh’s current exhibit is his first major one, but not his first. At prior exhibits he told me he would watch people reacting to the photographs. In order to enhance the viewer’s experience, he wrote text to accompany each. In addition to the framed photograph and text there is also a smaller sized version of another photograph accompanying the first. So while Welsh’s approach is clean, it is not absolutely objective. We who take in the photograph are not alone in that landscape; accompanied by Welsh’s words, we are guided through that sometimes very other space.
Another layer Welsh includes is music. On Friday there were several musicians playing a variety of pieces for brass instruments. But sometimes the photographs are accompanied by classical guitar pieces composed and performed by a friend who adapted ancient melodies from Icelandic sung-folk stories. Which adds a fourth layer to that Icelandic experience.

Alone for hours and days in remote places like “Kleifarvatn,” Drápuhlíðarfjall,” and Reynisdrangar,” Welsh says he is sometimes mindful of Icelandic lore inhabited by ghosts and of almost the palpable spirit of the land which fills the space through which he moves. Then he talks of the Icelandic people, of the mix of their ancient and modern ways, and of their continued deep respect for the sometimes volatile landscape in which they too live.

Welsh special guest last Friday was the Ambassador of Iceland to the United States, Albert Jónsson. Escorting him around his exhibit which was a year in the making, Welsh is pleased to have the work at this stage of artistic completion.

The exhibit at Villanova University is free and open to the public and continues to April 12. Welsh has additional plans for the work in progress, as Iceland remains a compelling subject for him.


Shots Capture Unspoiled Iceland

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A review of John Welsh’s images of Iceland on display at Villanova University written by Philadelphia Inquirer art writer, Victoria Donohue.


THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, March 2007

By Victoria Donohue

John Welsh, a Jenkintown photographer, keeps good company.

He’s drawn to picture-taking in Iceland’s wilderness as if to idealize or tame those primal landscapes – a vivid reminder of the 19th-century photographers stirred by the sheer magnificence of America’s Western landscape.

Thirty-four of Welsh’s images are now on view at Villanova from among the nearly 8,000 he captured during seven Icelandic trips he’s taken since 2001. The show’s title, “Icelandic Travels,” gives no hint of the rugged overland trekking Welsh did across much of that volcanic island nation to photograph bleak, even bizarre yet beautiful unpopulated terrain.

Showing his preference for the wide, horizontal picture format, Welsh made these photos to share with others his own sometimes-profound experience of virtually unspoiled, transcendental wilderness, so full of sudden unpredictable changes.


The strength of his pictures comes from their honesty and their ability to make us see and feel what nature still is in that part of the North Atlantic. These landscapes and their exaggerated vantage points – looking up into the sky or down at the ground or way off into the hills – add further to the quietude Welsh felt despite lightning bolts, howling winds and cascading waterfalls. And he has a taste for the dramatic.

The images, anchored in an autobiographical context, have a diarylike nature heightened by Welsh’s adding text about the setting as he experienced it to each photo’s title and date, instead of letting the picture speak for itself. A freelance commercial photographer, Welsh here seems to be working in the area between documentary photography and art.

Avoiding any feeling of contrivance in this work, Welsh happens upon particular moments in particular places and gently enshrines many of them. So who can deny that Welsh idealizes his subjects in ways reminiscent of William Henry Jackson and other American wilderness photographers of old? Fine show.