When Gareth McConnell was commissioned to photograph the wild horses of Iceland by the New York Times magazine last summer, there was a sense of apocalypse in the air. The news was dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and energy shortages and the climate emergency. McConnell didn’t know Iceland, or its singular horses, but he took with him, he says, a couple of personal reference points for the assignment.
One was Edwin Muir’s haunting poem The Horses, which begins: “Barely a twelvemonth after / The seven days war that put the world to sleep, / Late in the evening the strange horses came.” The other was pop shaman Bill Drummond’s belief that an interstellar ley line comes to Earth in the rifts and crags of Iceland (before later spiralling back underground outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool). McConnell was, at the very least, he told me last week, determined not to do a National Geographic set of pictures. The time and place seemed to demand something stranger, more unnatural.
