The magazine of the photo-essay
Dec 2017 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Snorri Bros
In 1993 in Reykjavík, Iceland, a bar named Kaffibarinn Frikki & Dýrið
opened its doors to the public. It was a small place on two floors, in a
modest, old corrugated iron house on a side street near Reykjavík’s main
shopping drag. In its first year, the electric atmosphere at this bar became
the source of legends, and Kaffibarinn (as it was commonly known)
became the epicenter of Iceland’s Gen-X. The people portrayed in
Barflies: Reykjavík are the Kaffibarinn regulars, the people who made up the
scene: “Bartenders, musicians, actors, actresses, writers, models,
entrepreneurs, photographers, computer geeks, students, filmmakers,
artists, and some just plain old barflies with nothing much to report.”
All of the portraits were shot within a short time period, and each subject
was shot only once. All of the pictures are framed in the same way, shot
with the same camera, the same lens and the same film, against the same
background, and with the same lighting. The camera used was an old
.
Hasselblad with a Polaroid back, which the Snorri Bros decided not to clean—this only increased the charm of the
resulting images.
The pictures in the book originally appeared in an exhibition in Reykjavík in April of 1994, to favorable reviews. Since then,
they have scarcely seen the light of day…until now.
