a-martin-text

Born 1975 and grown up in Munich, I live and work even today in this beautiful city.

Early on, my parents enabled me to discover the beauty of this world by taking me with them on several journeys. With each of these trips also my interest in photography grew – for me a wonderful opportunity to share what I was allowed to see with my own eyes. To share the feelings that arose while capturing.

1995, the beginning of my studies, I went on my first trip to Ireland, to which I also took my first SLR. From that point on, my interest in the northern part of Europe rose. Many more trips to Scotland, Norway, Ireland and Finland followed, until I went on my first trip to Iceland in 2007.

Right from the beginning I was under the spell of this island. I have never experienced so many different landscapes in such a small space. Never experienced that intensive. Fire and ice, among stinted beauty, endless range, rugged tracks and lovely valleys. Iceland offers all of this. After a tour around the island I came back several times to explore the more hidden parts of the island, far off the beaten tourist track from the shore up into the highland interior.

A special experience for me was certainly the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. While most people were happy to be as far away as possible from the ash cloud of the volcano, I took the next plane to Reykjavik, to see the outbreak with my own eyes. A huge experience where I was able to see the mighty power of our nature. But also the fates of the people who were directly affected by the outbreak have not gone unnoticed. All this has my relationship with this country more and more consolidated, so that I even started in the meantime to learn Icelandic.

What I could take from my trips is always the great respect that we should have for our nature and the understanding how beautiful our planet is. How small you are as a human being in this surroundings, how hard it is to survive. All this I try to capture and portray in my pictures.

Only a few trips to Namibia, where I worked for a social project with deaf children, brought me far out of the southern borders of Europe in recent years. Meanwhile, my family accompanied me on all my travels. My wife tolerates my photographic excursions with patience of a saint and supports me actively, while my son is showing me the world through different eyes.