Images 001



Photos by Elli Thor Magnusson

Notes

Published in The Surfer’s Journal 27.3

¹ Average water temperature of the Atlantic Ocean around Iceland:
Spring 41°F/5°C
Summer 51.8°F/11°C
Autumn 46.4°F/8°C
Winter 39.2°F/4°C

² Elli Thor Magnusson’s website:
ellithor.com

My Friend Elli
~ by Erin Ruffin

“When humans have made a whole lot of progress, they start to get bored. Then they talk again to the weather and the flowers and the stones, and they listen again to the singing of the stars.”
– Thorbergur Thordarson

Years ago, when I was on assignment in Iceland as a journalist, I met Elli Thor Magnusson in his hometown of Reykjavik. He was an enigma, like no one I had ever met before. He identifies first as a surfer, which is clearly an insane thing for an Icelandic person to be. For all the grit and fortitude that is surely required of a person to surf in the frigid and often furious North Atlantic Ocean, Elli outwardly displays very little. He is gentle, soft-spoken, and well-read. He can recommend Icelandic writers, explain the sagas and how the country’s roads were mapped out with consideration for the gnomes and fairies believed to be living in certain mounds of the country’s volcanic earth. 

His home is a cabin on the edge of a lake, a shell of an A-frame that he’s turned into any traveler’s dream crash-pad – roofing it, siding it, and plumbing it himself. Elli is a home-builder, though he spends as much time on the road hunting the perfect wave as he does under his own roof.

And Elli is a photographer, which I intentionally list last here because these days everyone is a photographer but I can tell you that very few are like Elli, and for him, it’s the thing that ties everything together.

We met while working on a story about what it’s like to surf in Iceland. I had heard about Elli and the other 20 or so people who regularly surf off the country’s jagged coast, and I wanted to know what sort of magic alchemy must exist in those waves to get anyone up for fighting all the odds – and there are many – first of all to find surfable waves and then to get out into them. 

Elli explained very matter-of-factly that they are the toughest but most satisfying waves he’s ever surfed which was not enough to satisfy my curiosity. Elli is a man of few words, until you see his photographs. 

His archive documents years of surfing in Iceland and it tells a much bigger story than Elli is likely to tell you in words. The good waves you see in his photos are, of course, breathtakingly beautiful but what you also see is a group of friends whose passion and determination don’t just overcome the challenges of surfing in place where the water temperature can dip to 35-degrees Fahrenheit, but actively seek those challenges out. Because when an off-the-charts winter storm is headed towards Iceland, why wouldn’t you pack a camper van and drive straight into it, just in case it stirs up some waves? 

It’s no surprise Elli’s interest in photography grew right alongside his love of skating, surfing, and snowboarding. “When I was about six years old my family went to Berlin to visit my aunt. While we were there, I saw some punks on skateboards and I just thought it was so fucking cool. My parents bought me my first skateboard then and there,” Elli says. 

He started snowboarding when he was nine, and collecting all the skate and snowboard magazines he could get his hands on. 

“Living in Iceland you wouldn’t have access to those magazines, you couldn’t buy them here, so when I’d manage to get some I’d read them again and again and again,” Elli says. “There’s so much photography in those magazines and I think that’s seriously when I really got interested in it, and not just in the actual sports, but in the whole thing. It’s always nice to see a pretty photograph, but I always loved seeing more of the story, the behind the scenes stuff. Those magazines were my first introduction to that. They had a big influence on me.”

At 21 years old Elli went to Nepal on a big kayaking trip with his buddies and bought his first digital SLR camera while he was there. Before that he’d messed around on his dad’s film camera but was always leaving the film in hotel rooms and refrigerators. Elli remembers the digital camera feeling like the start of something, and he spent his time in Nepal documenting that trip and getting to know the camera. Looking back at the photos, he found there were few of the actual kayaking; he’d mostly captured his friends in that electrified time in life that comes right around their age, between the freedom of adolescence and the responsibilities of adulthood, exploring the beauty and remoteness of Nepal, and connecting to each other along the way. He laughs and says they weren’t very good photographs, but it is just like Elli to say that.

Back in Iceland, Elli spent a couple years assisting a commercial advertising photographer, and then went to the U.K. to study photography at Falmouth University, a degree he wasn’t able to finish after the Icelandic economy crashed and the value of the Króna plummeted. When he returned, it was to a country, once too expensive for most people to visit, suddenly finding itself on the brink of a tourism explosion now that foreigners could afford to visit. In no time Elli was getting hired to photograph Iceland’s unique landscapes and activities for tourism websites and brochures. 

The tsunami wave of travel along with the country’s stunning geography caught the eye of international outdoors and extreme sports brands, and Elli started booking work to shoot the sports and communities that had sparked his love of photography in the first place. 

“Lots of outdoors brands started getting interested in Iceland because it’s so beautiful and not densely populated,” Elli says, “and through social media I started getting that kind of work. Then cold-water surfing was the new frontier, getting more popular and I got put on that radar, too. Those jobs were the ones that I really loved working on.”

It was a perfect storm and Elli’s career took off.

After knowing and working with Elli for years now, I am still amazed by the depth and quality of images he’s able to capture, even in a genre like surf photography that can, at times, be hard to differentiate. But Elli comes from the land and the culture he documents. He doesn’t point a camera at a scene he likes, but works more like a sponge. He absorbs the environment and the atmosphere around him, mixes it with his own history and knowledge of that place, and then somehow filters everything into his images. The stories his photos tell are rich in detail and thick with feeling – the elated high of coming in after a good session in the water, the white-knuckle fear of driving through bad weather on icy, snow-drifted roads, the carefree middle-of-the-night-hot-tub-with-friends and the got-nowhere-to-be-tomorrow aftermath, the learned patience of the Icelandic surfers who wait and wait and wait for waves. It’s all there in the photos.

“I grew up in nature, unafraid of bad weather. My parents have been members of the rescue team here for 30 years and if the weather’s crazy they just go – they don’t sit at home. I couldn’t live in a place where the weather is nice all the time. It’s something that I actually need,” Elli says. “When I started surfing here, the wetsuits weren’t good, it was cold and miserable and not the best place to learn to surf and the weather is crazy with currents and big waves, but I just fell in love with it. There was no one doing it, honestly it’s almost a different sport here. It’s just completely different. There are still so many opportunities to explore and find waves and discover something. The solitude. The weather. It’s just different. The actual surfing is maybe 30% of it. The driving around, camping, trying to find waves, dealing with snowstorms… those are as important for me as the actual act of riding waves. There’s no map. There’s no guidebook. The forecasting sites don’t work here. You have to find the waves yourself. It’s good to have a little bit of struggle. Then you get some good waves and it is so special, it’s so worth it.”

It all comes back to the environment. The people around the sport. The landscape behind the athlete. The connection between the friends. The journey to the location. The weather, the light, the energy.

Elli talks a lot about Icelanders’ connection to nature and his desire to capture those moments when we feel most in tune with it. 

“I believe we still have a deep connection to nature and a basic need for it. Even if technology and society has alienated us, we can’t get rid of that need,” he says. 

Surfing is one of the ways he maintains that connection and it keeps him hunting for the next photograph, like Icelandic surfers hunt for their next line-up, to feel the magic of being out in the wild where anything could happen. Elli will be the one trying to bottle it up, for us and everyone else to get a glimpse of, too.