TITLE: The Stillness of Forces

This series is a black and white exploration of Iceland as a land shaped by opposing forces: permanence and transformation, silence and movement, solidity and light. Removed from color, the landscape reveals its underlying structure lines carved by time, textures molded by wind, ice, fire, and gravity.

Across these images, the terrain becomes both subject and language. Mountains bear the scars of erosion like ancient memory etched into stone. Waterfalls fall endlessly, not as spectacle, but as quiet persistence. Ice spreads, fractures, and retreats, exposing the fragile balance between endurance and decay. The land does not pose; it exists.

The night introduces another dimension. The aurora appears not as color, but as motion veils of light sweeping across the sky, intangible yet commanding. In monochrome, the aurora transforms from a visual phenomenon into a gesture, a breath across the darkness. Human presence, when it appears, is minimal: a single house, a distant road, small markers of scale within something vastly older.

This series does not seek to document Iceland as a destination, but as a state of being. Each frame is an encounter with time: geological time measured in millennia, atmospheric time measured in seconds, and human time caught briefly between them. The repetition of forms ridges, flows, horizons create a visual rhythm that ties the images together into a continuous narrative.

Rather than dramatic moments, these photographs dwell in stillness. They invite contemplation, asking the viewer to slow down and read the land as one would read a silent text, where meaning is found not in what is said, but in what endures.

AUTHOR: daniel lopez (Guatemala)

Daniel Lopez (30) was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1991. He lived in Guatemala City until his high-school graduation in 2010. After graduation he lived in Antigua Guatemala for one year and then decided to go to film-school in Vancouver at Vancouver Film School. After one year of this intensive Film Production Program he went back to Guatemala and started taking lots of pictures and working in the small and independent film industry of Guatemala. After taking so many pictures he made an expo in Antigua Guatemala and sold more than 20 different copies in 2015. He took a path were he ended up being the director of photography of one of the biggest documentaries made in Guatemala called "Serpiente Emplumada", also in theaters it was the most seen Guatemalan production in 2018. Daniel has worked on more than 4 feature fiction films as part of the camera team always. In 2019 he made a big expo with 8 different artists and sold more than half of the pictures he brought to this expo. And in 2021 he was the director of photography of another big documentary called "La Cuenca De La Serpiente", but this time it was a 3 episode series, which is still in post production. Daniel continued to submit images to international contests and now he feels he is on the right path to start submitting even more pictures to contests and maybe even win something.