Sabine Schirdewahn
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Photo book, Relvolver Publishing, 2016
Of Love & Care is a portrait of Siglufjörður, an old fishing town in the north of Iceland that experienced its heyday with the "herring adventure" in the 20th century until the 1970s. This period, which brought prosperity to one of the poorest societies in Europe, is still associated with haunting memories that are in the process of disappearing from the everyday lives of more recent generations.
The photographs of five family houses and the town were taken during two short residencies in 2010 and 2012. For various reasons, the interiors of the houses have remained almost unchanged over the past decades.
In a conversation with Örlygur Kristfinnsson, the founder and then director of the local Herring Era Museum, I learned that these houses with their complete inventory are or were so important to the respective owners that they did not want to give them up even when they moved away. Other residents kept the furnishings of the past and lived in them until their death. For these people, the houses and objects are individual references and thus a personal connection to the history of the place, the culture and tradition associated with it, as well as a refuge for their own biographical memories and identity. In these places, the individual sphere of life of each person is intertwined and preserved with that of those people who belong to this sphere of life but are no longer there.