How we view the landscape, can be shaped by the choice of words we use to describe it.

The word scar for instance has negative connotations. It is often used to convey damage, fault, or something that is permanent which cannot be repaired. We use it to describe emotional damage as well as physical.

I’m often conscious that my choice of words can influence how I feel about a place. Often the feelings come first, and I hunt for a word to describe my feelings. Other times, the words come first, and an emotional reaction is derived by the words I chose to describe the place.

Much like long exposures record the passage of time, scars are a recording of the landscape’s formation. There is something in this for me. I am drawn to knowing that there is history. I am intrigued even, because I realise, I will never know the full story of what happened here.

But I’ve come to see scars in the landscapes as something more than just a mark, a trace of the landscape’s formation. They can be wonderful composition motifs, pleasing or perhaps providing tension to the scene I am recording.

I have re-imagined what I think the word scar means.

They are natures drawings, often loaded with aesthetic beauty as well as many other things.

Some more photogenic than others. Some more meaningful than others. I find myself drawn to them, and I can’t really get to the bottom of why. All I know is they satisfy my visual curiosity for building compositions that are meaningful to me in some way.

I think this is why I am drawn to the interior of Iceland. It is a young landscape. The traces of its formation are apparent, if not in understanding, for I am no geologist, but certainly in terms of graphic artistry. I often feel as though I am looking at the underlying structure of our world. Stripped back to the essentials. It suits my aesthetic for the minimal and graphic. But it also suits my need for connection. For understanding the landscape.

Landscape photography is not just about looking for the graphic aesthetic. We are looking for connection. Often, I think I am hunting for a visual home. A place of familiarity. I am a Scot, and the weather, quality of light and muted colour palate present in the Icelandic interior makes me feel as though I am home in the Scottish Highlands. There is a lot of similarity, even though there is a vast difference in age by several hundred million years between the two landscapes. Iceland’s landscape is young. The oldest parts being roughly 20 million years old. Scotland’s landscape is approximately 480 million years old.

And yet I feel at home. So much so, that when I return to my homeland of Scotland, I find it much easier now to imagine where the glaciers one stood. How each valley was formed by vast tonnes of ice scraping and sculpting the land. I see traces of all this in the scars left behind. Which brings me back full circle to realising that scars on land are somehow more important to me than I had once realised.