Iceland Photo Archive

Photo: DV/Unknown

A photo of Austurstræti, one of Reykjavík’s oldest streets, taken at Christmas in the mid- to late 1950s. The cars on the right are parked where the Hótel Ísland used to stand. When it opened in 1882 it was only the fifth hotel ever built in Reykjavík. (The first one opened in 1853 and closed ten years later.) In 1944, Hótel Ísland was destroyed in a fire. In the sixties the parking lot that replaced it became a gathering place for the city’s youth, and got a particularly hard-to-translate nickname, Hallærisplanið. (“Uncool Square” and “Insufficiency Park” come close, but not really). In the mid-nineties the city built a new square called Ingólfstorg to replace what were by then parking lots on both sides of the street. It’s still popular with young people (skaters have replaced punks and hipsters). It’s a place for concerts and other events in summer and in winter it has occasionally been turned into a skating rink.

Photo: Óskar Gíslason

Depending on where you come from, Tjörnin is either a small lake or a big pond. Calling it a lake might confuse people because “Tjörnin” really just means “The Pond”. Once upon a time a small brook used to flow from it to the sea, through what is still known as Lækjargata (Brook Street). In summer it’s a favorite hangout of ducks and geese, and in winter, like in this photo from the 1960s, you can sometimes also see humans there. In the early 1990s the city built its new city hall, the Ráðhús in the north-west corner of Tjörnin.

Photo: Sveinn Þormóðsson

A VW Beetle crawls down a snowy and hard-to-pronounce street in Reykjavík. Note the Christmas decorations.

Photo: Sigurður Úlfarsson

An Icelandic television crew at the creation of the volcanic island of Syrtlingur in 1965. (Anything happening now?)

Photo: Ari Kárason

The first espresso bar opened in Reykjavík on 9 January 1958. From a newspaper that day: “The coffee there is made with an Italian method using steam pressure and is supposed to be very strong and uplifting.”

Photo: Andrés Kolbeinsson

Sigríður Einarsdóttir Magnússon playing guitar in Reykjavík at the beginning of the twentieth century, long before Iceland Airwaves. On her left is a spinning machine known in Icelandic as a “rokkur”.

Alcoholic beer was banned in Iceland from 1901 to 1989.

Photo: Einar Einarsson

Note the petrol pump between the cars on the left.

Photo: Jón Árnason

“I feel like a lot of Icelandic musicians are trying to do something original, or at least original to the Icelandic scene. When there’s so many bands in such a small place, no one wants to sound like the band who lives next to you. I think also a big part of the quality is people are influenced by each other and there’s really no way of making a living off music in Iceland so people do it for other reasons, I guess.”
— Sindri Már Sigfússon, also known as Sin Fang, in an interview with Death and Taxes on 25 January 2010.

Photo: Karl Christian Nielsen