Euan Ross, from the most excellent Biblioscapes podcast interviewed me about my book ‘The Sound of Snow’. I hope you enjoy it.
Check out Euan’s podcast. He has interviewed many fine photographers.
When to know you're being complimented
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.
Assynt February 2022 Workshop
I’ve just set up a second workshop for Assynt (north west region of the Scottish Highlands) for February 2022.
This is one of my own personal favourite locations in Scotland, and February can often be one of the coldest months in Scotland. So there’s a good chance of finding snow on the mountains around this region, as well as interesting winter light.
Assynt & Inverpolly, Scottish Highlands
Price: £2,395
£688.50
Price: £2,395
Initial deposit: £688.5
2nd Deposit of £688.5 due six months before tour start date
5-Day Photographic Workshop
Date: March 2 - 7, 2026
Introduction
In the far north west lies some of the most distinctive mountains of Scotland. Stac Pollaidh, Suilven, Canisp and Cul Mor dominate the landscape, yet there is an abundance of wide open space. This is real highland countryside with some dramatic coastal scenery to boot.
Postpone another year?
I bet you’re keen to go travelling with your camera.
I’m just wondering if you’re one of the many who are thinking ‘give it another year, and things will all be back to normal’.
My view is that things aren’t going to go back to normal any time soon. Not in the next five years at least. My reasoning is that I’ve noticed a trend. We’ve all been thinking ‘give it a few more months, and things will be better’ since this all started 18 months ago. It’s a constantly shifting time-line with no end in sight.
So my view is: if you are going to keep postponing until everything is more reliable, less uncertain, you may be squandering valuable years of your life. I’d suggest just trying your best to get out there, and go travelling.
Since August, I’ve been to Iceland twice. I am there right now. Apart from the red-tape (more an effort in my view to be seen to be doing something, with a dash of politics thrown in), I’m here. I’m having a good time. And no, I’m not going to die from Covid, and I’ve probably got a lot less chance of catching it in the wilderness of Iceland’s landscape, than I do frequenting the supermarkets of my home town in Scotland.
But that isn’t the reason why most of us aren’t travelling. It’s the uncertainty of the rules that are stopping most of us. That we could get stuck somewhere. Or even catch covid and have to go into quarantine in a foreign town.
Heaven forbid.
Well my thoughts are: I’d much rather take that chance, than sit at home doing nothing for the next few years of my life.
So are you up for postponing for another year?
I hope not. Because very little is going to change.
Best to get out there. Now. Even do something in your own country is better than not going at all.
All we ever have is the present moment. The past is gone, and any control we have over the future is just an illusion.
Book has shipped
I’m so pleased to finally ship my new book ‘The Sound of Snow’. I was very happy with last year’s production ‘Hálendi’, and this year’s production is up to the same quality.
I had always planned to do this book on Hokkaido, but I thought it would be a few years before it was out. I had not anticipated that a pandemic would halt my workshops, and send my business into nose dive.
The sound of Snow was accelerated, because I had the free time to work on it.
I have been very fortunate to have a large portfolio of images to rely on, and although producing a book does not make me rich, it has helped contribute to keeping me afloat. I am aware that for many of my workshop participants, they do not understand the economics of my business model, but suffice to say that I wasn’t sure I could get to 18 months of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and still be here.
This book has become more important to me than I would have ever thought. So I would like to thank those of you who bought a copy.
I have also received some lovely emails this week from some of the buyers of the book who have now received their copy. This is just great to hear, as each book project is always fraught with problems. When the book finally arrives I am always holding my breath to see if the production quality is up to what I had asked for, and this book is certainly there.
Comments so far:
What a beautiful book! Just wanted to say thank you for your obvious efforts in compiling such an inspirational book. Beautifully thought out and presented. Wonderful attention to detail and in my humble opinion, your best book so far. Excited to hear about the retrospective!
Neil Brayshaw
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New book arrived today and the printers have done a great job - beautiful photography and publication.
Euan Ross
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Hi Bruce hope you are well just to let you know i received you latest book today and must say the pictures are beautiful and really like your minimalist capture.
David Gaunt
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Just to thank you for the safe delivery of my book. Absolutely over the moon with it!
Charlie Robinson
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Dear Bruce,
Your book arrived yesterday and I love the pictures, especially considering the conditions you must have faced. Thank you also for sending it so well packaged – much appreciated
Best Regards,
Chris Chate
Iceland Air
So Iceland air cancelled my flights earlier this summer, with no explanation and offered me a ‘credit voucher’, and in very small text ‘ask for a refund’. I went through the ‘ask for a refund bit’, but found the website took me in a loop which took me back to the voucher acceptance stage. So I tried to contact them via their online chat thing - it doesn’t work. A month later it still doesn't work. So then I tried phone - waited over 40 minutes and gave up. Then I found a contact form, which I asked them for my money back. This was a month ago. I received nothing.
So today I finally get through to their staff on the phone and they tell me I accepted the credit voucher, which apparently has an expiry date, and once accepted, a refund is no longer possible (why not?). But I disputed that I had accepted the voucher. I never went anywhere near accepting it. And they’re not refunding me.
Last year on the way home form Iceland at the start of the pandemic (this was around March), instead of taking me back to Glasgow they dropped me off in Heathrow London. This was apparently for my own safety. My connecting flight home to Glasgow was via London city which is at the opposite side of London from where they dumped me. And I was supposed to pay for this myself and claim it back.
I will never use Iceland air again.
Retrospective
I’m acutely aware that if one has an audience, that audience are always one step behind you. One of the best ways to illustrate that point is with my photographic books. Books are always based on the past. They can never be an illustration of where you are right now.
In my own case, the last three books I’ve published have been planned for about five years. We knew we were going to do Altiplano, Hálendi and then Sound of Snow. In that order.
This had always been the plan except the last two books came out rather quickly because I had the free time this past year to focus on the design of them. Had it not been for the pandemic, both Hálendi and The Sound of Snow would probably still be vapourware, and so when they would have finally become physical objects, the images within them would be even older than they are now.
This is just a ‘placeholder’ image. This is not the design or intended cover of any retrospective book I end up making.
So in this way, photographic books are always historical. They are a statement of past events.
I am now up to date: the cupboard is now empty of ‘completed projects’.
Which brings me on to thinking about a retrospective. A book that will cover the last decade or so since I ‘went professional’ for want of a better term.
I don’t just want to do a book that has a collection of images only. I’m more interested in telling a story.
So I think the book will try to convey the development and progress of my imagery over the past 10 years.
I’m very aware that certain landscapes have been teachers. And that in order to photograph one kind of landscape, I had to do my homework elsewhere first. I could not have known how to approach the black deserts of Iceland if I had not photographed the Altiplano of Bolivia first. Similarly, I could not have known how to develop my photographs in winter landscapes had it not been for working on luminosity / tonality in the black deserts of Iceland. My Japan imagery was built on top of my experiences of working in the vast black deserts of Iceland. And so on…..
So this is where I think I would like to take such a book. A chronology of epiphanies perhaps. As I often think that if one is developing, there are often times when we hit a new level of awareness, where things come together and begin to make sense.
Thinking this way, and realising that the whole thing is a path of progression, I can’t help but come to the realisation that every point that has come before, has been taking me to where I am right now.
Dream logic
David Lynch understands the intuitive aspect of creativity. He also understands the unconscious aspects of his audience, and how they respond when watching movies.
I think good artists intuitively know how to create work that has room for interpretation.
In a nutshell
All you need to know about creativity:
Trekking in Iceland
I’m in Iceland right now. I just completed walking the Lauavegur trail for the third time. It's been really good to come back to Iceland for my own mental health, and to take some weight off the constant Media pressure about the pandemic. Life, I was starting to forget, continues it seems.
So here is a picture of my tent on the second night of the trek. And before you ask, no I didn't put the stones around it it. They were already there 👍😊
