Photographer Varvara Lozenko traveled to Iceland.

14 January, Vík í Mýrdal
In Iceland, they don’t believe in hell: because there simply can’t be room for evil. There is only heaven. We were just drinking wine with a Protestant pastor and missed the northern lights. The neighbors are keeping an eye out…

The northern lights are most like music.

Nature is boundless and perfect, man is limited and imperfect.

16 January, Reykjavík
A fifteen-year-old boy walks home from school, smoking a cigarette and saying he despises rules: he has his own. A girl without outerwear at a bus stop says she’s been recovering from bulimia for four months. “My mother,” she says, “works in parliament. She used to be at WikiLeaks, and tomorrow they’re starting a film about her. Cumberbatch promised to visit.” A boy in a national sweater rides a bicycle along the sea. He says, “The only thing to say about me is that I am joyful, and that’s it.”

The freedom here is such that condoms are scattered on the tables of public reception areas, mothers leave strollers outside cafes while watching through the glass, and locals tell strangers about their oddities, including very unusual ones.

17 January, Reykjavík
I asked a passerby the secret of this amazing feeling of freedom. He said: “No one has ever fought with anyone here. Iceland has no borders. With no one. No army, no navy, no street surveillance cameras. There is no fear.”

A pilot about to retire decided it would be cool to fly through a crack in a rock called Diruley on the southern coast. And he flew! Accidents only happen to foreigners… Nature is merciful to those who grow up without fear of it.

19 January, Reykjavík
It’s raining and hailing constantly, and Bob Dylan is playing everywhere… even nature seems lethargic after Friday.

20 January, Reykjavík
My face was almost blown away today at the Hallgrimskirkja bell tower. It’s Reykjavik’s main church… not named after a saint, but rather after Hallgrim Petursson, who wasn’t. He married a woman kidnapped by Algerian pirates and composed psalms about the Passion of Christ.

21 January, Reykjavík
The bathroom is covered with pages from a novel by Nobel laureate Laxness.

Foreigners seem to go mad here. Perhaps because everything is possible. A German yelled in a pub: “I’m in Iceland, I’m free-e-e!!!” An American drunkenly attempted a dive in the freezing sea at 3 a.m. but got stuck in quicksand near Vík — lucky, because had he jumped, he’d have drowned like all before him.

24 January, Reykjavík
Nothing is happening, yet I feel euphoric, as if constantly under the influence of something. As I saw written in some cafe: love is you.

25 January, Thingvellir
The taxi driver talks to himself about tectonic plates: Europe rubs against America, one city rises by a centimeter, another falls by one and a half… He says, “In six hundred years, everything will move apart, but I won’t care.”

Iceland is the only country to have defeated McDonald’s — it went bankrupt here. Officially due to supply chain costs, but that’s nonsense.

24-25 January, Ulvers Fetl (Wolf Mountain)
The house was flat, spread out for stability. The wind shook it so much it felt like it moved. Korean Juhee is so thin that when the wind blows, she falls. When it’s too strong, she clings to the radiator and reads.

26 January, Reykjavík
Before the 2008 crisis, there used to be a retro Rolls-Royce or even several in every yard here. It was fashionable to collect vintage cars and dress in the Anglo-American style. Something in the spirit of Scott Fitzgerald and the characters from Brideshead Revisited — lots of brilliantine and brittle gestures. No one was allowed into normal places in an Icelandic sweater: only peasants and tourists wore them. And the haircut had to be like David Lynch’s, with a long forelock at an angle. Now you can wear a granny-knit sweater to the most fashionable clubs and everyone has a beard. I met a boy who admitted that he was really worried that his beard had not grown a year ago. It only started growing normally when I was 23.

27 January, Akureyri
Key words from last night: trunk blown off, blizzard, unclear where, can’t see the road, phone not working, rescue service not responding.

A Polish immigrant family in an overloaded car and me. We were driving to Thorshofn, the far northeast, but made it only to Akureyri. Spent the night in a motel.

28 January, Thorshofn
Now in the most remote wilderness. The journey took two days in a blizzard with fierce winds. The Poles I traveled with were uneasy. No one could be sure of the outcome.

The weather is wretched, but you can stare at the Arctic Ocean for hours… Horizontal freezing rain pelts the face like tiny ice bullets. I take photos of fishing boats and houses stripped of paint by wind. The only cafe serves hot dogs.

A small boy whispers something incomprehensible, like seabird language. His eyes are impossibly blue, his hair white. He doesn’t play volleyball with the other ten school-age children. Instead, he watches from under a table — his nest.

1 February, Thorshofn
If I could change my birthplace, I’d want it to be the 65th parallel. Spent my birthday alone with the Arctic wind, a farmer family, their five dogs, and fourteen horses.

2 February, Akureyri
Three weeks in the polar climate: you buy two bananas and ration them, take fish oil capsules, snack on micro carrots.

I’m almost out of film, but my head keeps writing. There can never be too much beauty… Too little, maybe. But never too much.

4 February, Siglufjörður
A northern guest house in winter: a four-story building for fifty people, empty. The smell of coffee permeates everything. Sometimes a silent man in gray appears, calling himself a consultant.

The streets are deserted, the ships moan in the harbor. Took an hour-and-a-half bus ride along steep coasts through tunnels carved in mountains. Before they were built three years ago, travel here was nearly impossible — except by sea.

5 February, Siglufjörður
“I’m going to cut up some sharks now,” he says.

“How big are they?” I ask.

“From here to the door — about five meters.”

Saw a seal, a polar ptarmigan, and two Greenland sharks.

6 February, Siglufjörður
In Iceland, search operations begin the moment someone is reported missing. Whether a politician or a carpenter, the response is the same — police, firefighters, rescue teams mobilize instantly. Such is the value of human life in a country of only 320,000 people.

7 February, Akureyri
A man with a snowdrift on his hood just drove past.

7 February, Route Akureyri – Reykjavík
Knitted a hat on the bus. What’s happening to me is unclear…

Iceland is not for people in general, but for each person individually.

Text and photo: Varvara Lozenko (Seasons Project)