The Light Archive

At first glance, Helga Þórsdóttir's gallery in Reykjavík looks like someone has obsessively catalogued paint samples from the world's most melancholy hardware store. Nearly 3,000 small rectangles of color cover the walls in a shifting grid, each one a different shade of gray, blue, white, or amber. But look closer at the tiny labels beneath each panel—"March 3, 14:27 — sun through ice crystal suspension" or "September 15, 19:43 — aurora borealis through low cloud cover"—and you realize something extraordinary is happening here. For twelve years, this Icelandic photographer has been trying to do the impossible: capture and preserve the exact color of light itself.

What started as a personal obsession has become something like a scientific expedition. Every day for over a decade, Þórsdóttir has stepped outside her Reykjavík studio at different hours, in all weather, with a specialized light meter and her phone's camera. She measures the color temperature of the ambient light, notes the atmospheric conditions, then returns inside to painstakingly mix pigments until she achieves what she believes is a perfect match. The result is a kind of chromatic diary of Iceland's sky—each panel representing one specific moment when she looked up and thought, "I need to remember exactly how this looks."

Her early attempts were rough—you can see where she was still figuring out how to translate the sparkle of sunlight through ice crystals or the subtle glow of aurora light filtered through clouds. But by 2015, she'd developed a systematic approach that turns each observation into a kind of recipe. She records the exact time, weather conditions, and precise measurements, then experiments with different pigment combinations until she gets a match. Some panels required months of trial and error. "June 21, 02:14 — solstice light through volcanic ash" took her forty-three attempts to capture the weird orange-gray glow that happens when midnight sun filters through airborne particles from Iceland's active volcanoes.

More recently, Þórsdóttir has begun experimenting with digital technology to bridge the gap between her static pigment panels and the dynamic nature of actual light. She's developed a series of high-resolution LED screens that can display her color fields while subtly shifting brightness and temperature throughout the day. The screens are programmed to cycle through seasonal progressions in real-time, so viewers can experience a year of Icelandic light compressed into an hour. It's an unsettling experience—the screens somehow make you feel the weight of approaching winter or the giddy euphoria of returning spring light, even when you're sitting in a gallery in the middle of summer. She's also working with programmable lighting systems that could theoretically recreate historical atmospheric conditions in interior spaces, though she admits the technology isn't quite there yet.

The strangest thing about seeing all these panels together is how they reveal patterns you'd never notice just by living through Icelandic weather. The winter months cluster in cool blues and grays, but they're not monotonous—there are dozens of subtly different whites, each capturing a specific kind of overcast sky or snow-reflected sunlight. The brief summer explosion of warm colors feels almost violent after all that restraint. You can literally see climate change happening in the recent panels, with color combinations that she'd never recorded before appearing in 2023 and 2024. Unseasonably bright winter days that required entirely new pigment recipes to match.

The philosophical implications of the project extend beyond its immediate visual impact into questions about the relationship between duration and preservation. Þórsdóttir's archive attempts to arrest phenomena that exist only in constant flux, creating permanent records of experiences defined by their transience. The endeavor recalls both the typological photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, with its systematic documentation of disappearing architectural forms, and the phenomenological investigations of James Turrell's skyspaces, though Þórsdóttir's approach inverts Turrell's strategy of creating controlled viewing conditions for natural light by instead bringing natural light into controlled preservation conditions.

What makes the project feel less like art and more like accidental science is how useful it's turned out to be. Architects designing buildings in northern climates now consult Þórsdóttir's archive to understand how natural light actually behaves throughout the year, rather than relying on theoretical models. Film studios have commissioned her to recreate the specific lighting conditions of historical periods—apparently the light in medieval Iceland looked quite different before industrial pollution changed atmospheric composition. Even researchers studying seasonal depression in arctic animals have found her work helpful for understanding how light patterns affect biological rhythms

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Þórsdóttir's project is how it makes you aware of everything you're not seeing. Walking through the installation, you realize that most of us move through our days completely oblivious to the subtle chromatic shifts happening overhead. We might notice that it's "gray" or "sunny," but we miss the hundreds of variations within those categories—the difference between 3 p.m. overcast in February versus 3 p.m. overcast in April, or how volcanic ash creates an entirely different quality of golden hour than clear skies.

Her archive functions as both celebration and memorial, preserving atmospheric conditions that may not exist much longer as global weather patterns continue to shift. It's an impossible project pursued with absolute devotion—an attempt to hold onto something that exists only in its constant disappearance. But maybe that's exactly the point. In a world where so much feels unstable and ephemeral, there's something deeply moving about someone who decided to spend twelve years looking up at the sky and saying, "This matters. This exact moment of light deserves to be remembered."