The Icelandic Horse Project goes public. Celebrating ten years as a full-time animal photographer in one weekend
Vlagtwedde, 30 April – 3 May 2026There is a photograph of a silver dapple mare standing in the dunes on Terschelling, an island off the Dutch coast, the dunes behind her, the light low. They call her Eska, her official name is Silfurkolla frá Fitjum born in 2007. She lives there year-round with a mixed herd that winters in the dunes, and I have been visiting her and the herd for years now. She is the photograph that travelled the furthest this spring. She went up on posters in the village, opens the homepage of icelandichorseproject.com, stood at the centre of the invitation for my jubilee weekend, and was one of two photographs the local bakery printed onto a celebration cake.
The idea for the weekend itself had begun to bubble somewhere in October or November of last year. Ten years of being a full-time animal photographer was approaching, and it deserved more than just a date passing on the calendar. It deserved a place. People in a room with the work.
We held it from the 1st to the 3rd of May at MoeNieks, the location of Tim and Claudine, in the natural region of Westerwolde in the north-east of the Netherlands. Three days. More than fifteen years of work. The photographs hung from the woodshed outside, hung in the old barn with its high wooden beams, stood placed throughout the garden. Visitors stepped out of their cars into a place most of them had never seen before, willow trees, old wood, the Ruiten Aa river a few minutes' walk away, and arrived twice over: once for the work, once for the nature of the region it was hanging in.
One corner of the barn was given to The Icelandic Horse Project. The long-term work I have been building for years now, photographing herds, foals, character, and life in the landscape, across the Netherlands, on Terschelling, in Romania, in Denmark, and in Iceland itself. Last year, the wish to give the project its own home on the internet grew clearer, and the website went live just before the exhibition opened. So this corner was also where visitors could meet the project as it now stands. They read the texts, looked at the images, scanned the QR code that took them through to the website.
In a small space in a quiet corner, sitting on tree stumps, visitors watched a video called Through the eyes of the photographer. It was made from different sessions with Icelandic foals. The sounds with the waiting, the way the light moves, the foals choosing whether to come closer or to keep their distance. Visitors stepped in, sat down, and stayed. That was exactly what I had hoped for.
This is what I want to show, and what I want to keep showing. Not the competition photographs, not the staged shot. The Icelandic horse as it actually lives; mares with their foals, groups of geldings asleep in the sun, herds moving through landscape, individuals with their own quiet character. I wanted to show that the breed is so much more than its sport. That of course is cool and exciting and shows their fire. But for me this is something unique as well, and beautiful: landscape, behaviour, connections, for me it’s more primal, and I think the world deserves to see it.
One woman wrote a card during the weekend that I keep coming back to. Eyjólfur turned ten this year, which means in your first year as a full time photographer you were lying in our field photographing him as the foal of Jarl. For your exhibition notice board I'll share with you this beautiful photograph of him. Ten years ago I lay in the grass beside her foal. Now he is grown. More than ten years of horses I have followed. Foals I now know as full-grown horses and have their own foals. Horses whose herds I have visited again and again. This is what an archive is, when you let it grow slowly enough.
On the first evening, I opened the exhibition. I stood in a blue suit with a glass in my hand, in the late afternoon sun coming through the trees, and said a few words. I don't remember exactly what I said. Something about being grateful for the people and the support over the past ten years.
The Icelandic Horse Project will keep travelling: to Iceland in June, to other places after that, and back to the herds I already know. If you keep Icelandic horses, if you have a herd somewhere in a landscape around the world that means something to you, the project lives partly through people like you. Eska's herd on Terschelling, Eyjólfur's home in the Netherlands, the herd I will spend a week with in the east of Iceland this summer, each one a chapter that the archive could not exist without.
More than ten years in. The work is only just beginning.
The local news shared the exibiotion RTV Westerwolde