Vala Kjarval
Vala Kjarval (b. 1991) grew up on a farm in Upstate New York and is a dual citizen of Iceland where she lives now. She studied cinema screen at SUNY Oswego and photography at ICP and the University of Westminster in London. Her work aligns itself in the vein of photo-realism and humanistic photography, striving to best capture her subject’s purest selves. In her words “to catch a bit of their soul on the film.” Her photography has been featured online and exhibited in several countries. Her work covering NYC during the 2020 pandemic was part of the International Center of Photography’s book and groundbreaking show, #ICPconcerned and the Lenscratch Self-Quarantining Exhibition in 2020.
My works in progress, of “Moving Mountains” (even the title is a work in progress), are a look into my shift into surrealism, freeing me of the restraints of realism I’ve shackled myself to. Over the years I’ve found my niche in environmental portrait photography, marrying a subject to their surroundings to create the most honest portrayal of an individual's perspective and life story. This exhausting persistence to capture everything stems from my time in film school and as a photographer I’ve tried to condense entire stories into one single frame.
After moving full-time to Iceland in late 2021, I have found myself drawn more to landscapes than portraiture–freeing myself from any pressure to tell a story. I have been using the mountains as one would use a block of clay–merely as a medium to execute a certain feeling I want to render. Experimenting with analog and digital, I have started to create videos to bring the mountains into motion. With the use of a pivoting tripod and analog film I have been shooting fragments of landscapes and piecing them together in sequences in post-production. They have developed into never-ending scrolls, never letting the eye fixate on one still image–only to constantly rove back and forth lulling the viewer into a meditative state. Through this transition into surrealism, I am continuously becoming aware of emotional responses I didn’t know I wanted to express through my work. I suspect there will be different reactions as this work progresses.
