I don’t take compliments very well. There’s something in my upbringing, or perhaps in being Scottish, that prevents me from glowing in any form of adulation. It is something I personally abhor - anyone seeking kudos of any kind in my book, needs to be avoided. Because those that are genuine, do whatever it is they do, because they can’t not do it. You don’t do something for praise or reward, you just do it because it’s part of who. you. are.
I don’t wish to be anyone else either. I just think the best thing we can all do is be ourselves. Sounds easy, but how many folks do you think you know who are busy trying to ‘not’ be themselves? Trying to find something else that is far removed from where they are?
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realise that my past is so important to me. The friends I have, some of them since I was at high School, are so important to me, because we share something that cannot be bought at any price: memories, a past, a sense of ‘where we come from’.
This week I was in Iceland, and I bumped into Daniel Bergmann. He’s a well known Icelandic photographer. Daniel has worked as a photographic guide for a long list of well known landscape photographers over the past few decades. And I have a tendency to bump into him when I am out in the landscape.
Compliments, if they are genuine, tend to come at you when you least expect them.
I was sitting in the Highland centre, just off the F26 highland road when Daniel said ‘we should award you honorary Icelandic membership’. I hadn’t been fishing for a complement, but it meant a lot to me when he said it.
I have never wanted to be anyone else but me, and I am extremely proud of being Scottish. As I’ve grown older I have realised that my roots, my past, and my parent’s Scottish highland roots are very important to me. My parents are from Sutherland. I feel more Scottish now than I did when I was younger (I think that finding importance in our past and roots becomes more important as we get older).
But I do love Iceland, and I have found some kind of aesthetic affinity with the landscape there. So when Daniel gave me his complement, it stayed.
I think he sees me as someone who has been working the Icelandic landscape for a long while. It has been 17 years since i first went to Iceland. My relationship with the landscape has grown over the years and the country has had a lot to teach me about luminosity, tone, blacks, whites, and how weather is so important in working within the landscape.
Iceland’s landscape is not too distant from Scotland’s, but it can be more stark, more wild, more raw perhaps. Scotland’s landscape is an old one which has been worn down over the millennia, while Iceland’s is still a relatively new one. When we look around Iceland, we are able to glimpse how most of Earth looked at the beginning of creation.
But somehow, In my heart, Scotland and Iceland are inseparable brothers. They share an overlap, or subset, of weather, geology and beauty.
In any event, what Daniel said left an impression upon me.
So thank you Daniel. Thank you very much.