From June 01, 2024 to June 30, 2024
I visited Iceland over the course of August and September of 2006, at a pivotal time in my life. My memories of this enchanted place are bound up with its landscapes. Iceland consists of many incredible vistas … vast open spaces, open skies, mountains, streams and ponds, barren black rocks, volcanic sands, mossy stones, crashing ocean waves … soft misty light on some days, harsh sunny contrasts on others. All of these have now melded together in me. Everything I remember and feel about Iceland is now refracted through time and distance. As such, I reimagined and re-edited the photos from my trip in ways that now feel more authentic. These images embody my memories; this is how Iceland sits in my mind and heart today. Remarkably, I still return to Iceland in my dreams, and this is how I see things, more or less, as I dream.
In order to make these final images, I paired and grafted together various sets of photos from my trip. I also re-framed them in a 1:2 aspect ratio, in keeping with traditional Asian scroll paintings … an aspect ratio that is meant to emphasize the conjointment of Earth and Sky.
Curator: Sandrine Hermand-Grisel
Attila Ataner is a Toronto-based portrait and fine-art photographer. He is available for commissions and commercial assignments. Attila’s photographic art often explores themes that are parallel to his academic work on environmental philosophy.
Attila’s background is Turkish-Bulgarian; he was born in Svishtov, a small town on the Bulgarian shore of the Danube River. During the 80s, he lived in North Africa, in Tripoli, Libya, where his parents worked as ex-pats. He migrated to Canada later in life, as a teenager. Attila is a lifelong lover, practitioner and occasional teacher of photography. Attila is a graduate of McGill University (BA), McMaster University (MA), and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (JD). He is a recipient of numerous prestigious scholarships and grants, as well as a published author in various academic journals. He practiced law for a number of years, and later returned to school to do graduate-level work. In addition to his photographic work, he is also a part-time Ph.D. student in philosophy, working on environmental ethics and law, ecological philosophy and the thought of early-modern German philosophers, namely Kant and Hegel. Attila lives in Toronto with his wife and two young children.
