Learning to read fog

An autumn on the Faroe Islands, walking the same coast every afternoon, and what it means to photograph a place that keeps deciding whether to be seen.

Series: A Grammar of Fog
Place: Faroe Islands
Reading: 4 min

WindowSaksun

On my first afternoon in Saksun I watched the valley disappear. It took about four minutes. The fog came in from the fjord at the height of a house, slid over the tidal flat, filled the bowl of the valley and climbed the slopes on either side, and when it stopped there was a white room where the landscape had been, with a small church standing in the middle of it like a piece of furniture.

In black and white, a small grass-roofed church and two houses sit at the foot of a steep valley whose upper slopes vanish entirely into fog. — Fig. 01The valley gave back a church, and nothing else.Saksun, Erased, Saksun, Streymoy

I had come to the islands with a list of places, as one does. By the end of the first week I had thrown the list away. You cannot plan to photograph something in the Faroes; you can only decide where to stand and wait to see what the weather lets you have. Some days it was a cliff. Some days it was a fence post and the two metres of grass around it. Some days it was nothing at all, and I walked home with the camera dry in its bag.

A language with very few words

People here talk about the weather the way other people talk about family: with patience, a little exasperation, and a great deal of precise vocabulary. There are words for fog that sits on the sea and fog that comes down from the hills, for drizzle so fine it does not fall so much as hang. I learned a few of them from the farmer whose barn I rented, and I learned to watch the ridge above Gásadalur in the morning, because if it was gone by ten, the coast would be gone by two.

In black and white, a narrow road curves along a hillside and disappears into dense fog after a short distance. A single fence post stands at the verge. — Fig. 02Two hundred metres of certainty, then white.Road, Going, Near Gásadalur

What the fog does, more than anything, is edit. It takes away the background, then the middle distance, then the colour, until a scene has been reduced to one thing and the space around it. A road becomes a line that leads into a page. A sheep on a ridge becomes a sentence. That is why I worked in black and white: the fog had already made that choice, and I only followed it.

Fog does not hide a place. It tells you, very slowly, which part of it matters.

Things that stayed

Some subjects returned day after day, and I came to think of them as the vocabulary of the series. The black sea stack off Eysturoy, whose top I never once saw. The waterfall at Gásadalur, falling straight into the ocean as if it had somewhere urgent to be. The turf-roofed house at the end of the Saksun road, with one window that was lit every afternoon at four, whether or not anyone was home.

In black and white, a lone sheep stands on a grassy ridge, turned toward the camera, with nothing behind it but a flat field of white mist. — Fig. 03She heard the sea before I did.Listening, Vágar

In black and white, a close view of a dark timber house with a grass roof. Its single white-framed window is the brightest point in a soft grey scene. — Fig. 04The brightest thing for miles.Window, Saksun

I photographed that window perhaps thirty times. In most frames the house is barely there; the fog has taken its walls and left only a dark shape and a small warm square of light. It is the picture I am asked about most. People want to know who lived there. I never found out. It seemed better not to ask, and to let the window stay what the fog had made it: the one thing in the valley that was keeping watch.

Learning to leave

The hardest part of working in fog is knowing when to stop. There is always a chance that the next minute will open something, that a cliff will step forward or the sea will brighten. I lost whole evenings to that hope, standing in the wet with my hands in my sleeves. Toward the end of the autumn I began to stop earlier, and the pictures got better. Fog rewards attention, not insistence.

In black and white, a wide and almost empty frame: a faint horizon between grey sea and grey sky, broken only by the dim outline of a distant island. — Fig. 05An island, or the memory of one.What the Fog Kept, Looking toward Koltur

On the ferry home, the islands went behind me the way the valley had gone on that first afternoon, one ridge at a time, until there was only the grey water and the sound of the engine. I stood at the rail for a long while afterwards, looking at the place where they had been, and did not take a single picture.