Some readers do send me their opinions about the book. I will publish those reviews here with the author's kind permission and in the original language.
Manche Leser schicken mir ihre Meinung über das Buch. Ich werde diese Rezensionen mit freundlicher Erlaubnis der Verfasser hier in der ursprünglichen Sprache veröffentlichen.
Manche Leser schicken mir ihre Meinung über das Buch. Ich werde diese Rezensionen mit freundlicher Erlaubnis der Verfasser hier in der ursprünglichen Sprache veröffentlichen.
4 Jack D. Ives, Canada
ICEVISIONS is a self-published large format book of ice photographs with text and selected literary quotations in English, French, German, and Icelandic. Klaus Kretzer, author, photographer, and publisher, has achieved a masterpiece of photographic art ranging from landscapes of Jökulsárlón, the famous rapidly enlarging glacier lake in southeast Iceland, and its mountain backdrop, together with exquisite, often abstract close-ups of ice in many forms.
In the introduction he explains how he came to be captivated by the challenge of representing ice in many of its remarkable forms. As a visitor to Iceland from Germany he happened to find a job working with the Jökulsárlón tourist service. He became fascinated with the close-up forms and remarkable colours of ice but was dissatisfied with his early photographic efforts. As he accompanied photographers from all over the world piloting them in a rubber boat amongst the icebergs on the lake he had the good fortune to meet a professional Swiss photographer. Christian Mehr became his mentor, even lending him equipment. However, three years of effort failed to attract a publisher – even in Iceland, well-known for its prodigious production of high quality photographic books. Such specialization on ice was not the best way to find a publisher. So he decided to ‘go it alone’.
Many of the fifty-five photographs deserve to be enlarged and framed as they would grace any living room, be it the wider landscapes or the abstract ice forms. The blues and greens of the close-ups are breath-taking and warrant wide recognition. The lay-out of the book is itself a work of art and the author acknowledges his colleague Petra Bachmann for assistance in this aspect of the production.
There are excellent commentaries on the photographs themselves, an account of the formation of the glacier lake in the 1930s and its subsequent development: this assisted by Dr Helgi Bjornsson, Iceland’s leading glaciologist. Each photograph is accompanied by an appropriate quotation. These range from the Old Testament, Ovid, St Brendan, Henry David Thoreau, Lt James Fitzjames, who was with Franklin in 1845, Coleridge, Robert Frost, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, Robert Falcon Scott, and Barry Lopez, amongst others.
This reviewer found the book fascinating. It was a rare pleasure to be able to sit quietly and dream of ice, great poets, early explorers, and rejoice in ones own excursions amongst glaciers and mountains and the people who live amongst them or visit them. Klaus has the best of both worlds as he lives amongst ice and mountains with his wife, Regina Hreinsdóttir, who in Superintendent of nearby Skaftafell National Park.
The book was exquisitely printed and bound in Reykjavik.
JDI
ICEVISIONS is a self-published large format book of ice photographs with text and selected literary quotations in English, French, German, and Icelandic. Klaus Kretzer, author, photographer, and publisher, has achieved a masterpiece of photographic art ranging from landscapes of Jökulsárlón, the famous rapidly enlarging glacier lake in southeast Iceland, and its mountain backdrop, together with exquisite, often abstract close-ups of ice in many forms.
In the introduction he explains how he came to be captivated by the challenge of representing ice in many of its remarkable forms. As a visitor to Iceland from Germany he happened to find a job working with the Jökulsárlón tourist service. He became fascinated with the close-up forms and remarkable colours of ice but was dissatisfied with his early photographic efforts. As he accompanied photographers from all over the world piloting them in a rubber boat amongst the icebergs on the lake he had the good fortune to meet a professional Swiss photographer. Christian Mehr became his mentor, even lending him equipment. However, three years of effort failed to attract a publisher – even in Iceland, well-known for its prodigious production of high quality photographic books. Such specialization on ice was not the best way to find a publisher. So he decided to ‘go it alone’.
Many of the fifty-five photographs deserve to be enlarged and framed as they would grace any living room, be it the wider landscapes or the abstract ice forms. The blues and greens of the close-ups are breath-taking and warrant wide recognition. The lay-out of the book is itself a work of art and the author acknowledges his colleague Petra Bachmann for assistance in this aspect of the production.
There are excellent commentaries on the photographs themselves, an account of the formation of the glacier lake in the 1930s and its subsequent development: this assisted by Dr Helgi Bjornsson, Iceland’s leading glaciologist. Each photograph is accompanied by an appropriate quotation. These range from the Old Testament, Ovid, St Brendan, Henry David Thoreau, Lt James Fitzjames, who was with Franklin in 1845, Coleridge, Robert Frost, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, Robert Falcon Scott, and Barry Lopez, amongst others.
This reviewer found the book fascinating. It was a rare pleasure to be able to sit quietly and dream of ice, great poets, early explorers, and rejoice in ones own excursions amongst glaciers and mountains and the people who live amongst them or visit them. Klaus has the best of both worlds as he lives amongst ice and mountains with his wife, Regina Hreinsdóttir, who in Superintendent of nearby Skaftafell National Park.
The book was exquisitely printed and bound in Reykjavik.
JDI
3 Claudia Hilsenbeck-Lay, Germany
Have you ever marvelled at the metamorphosis that water – clear, liquid, colorless – goes through when exposed to a relatively short period of freezing into an ice-cube? A substance you were hardly able to keep in your hands has become a solid, structured object, and every one of its kind has an own unique pattern.
Imagine now that this piece of ice is maintained for years, decades, centuries, millennia, trapped, weighed down by more of its kind, crushed, pressed, shoved, exposed to the elements, freezing and thawing and freezing again, this cycle repeated over and over again, making occasional contact with the surrounding world, taking up sediment and making contact with water both sweet and salt, which further makes its impact on ice’s physical structure and appearance.
It is this substance and its metamorphoses that have fascinated Klaus Kretzer, a German-born, long-time resident of Iceland, from his first visit on to Jökulsárlón, a lagoon in the southeast of the island famous for its icebergs born of the Vatnajökull glacier complex. Since then he has spent many seasons and trips investigating this amazing material with his camera, capturing his finds in breathtaking photographs now published in the volume “Icevisions”. The visible form variations of the icebergs shown in this book are endless and often seem to ridicule all laws of gravity. Their structures are so diverse, set in layers, towering like cathedrals, with sharp edges, smooth surfaces, deeply transparent sections like meter-thick glass, then again fragile and translucent, with wavy surfaces or enclosed air bubbles or pockets sometimes filled with sediment water called glacier milk. What strikes the eye in particular though is the incredible variation in color, the hues of black, blue, green, turquoise and white that the ice reflects, depending among others on the density of its material. Every turn of the page reveals new and unseen forms and combinations that keep the reader spellbound. Reading indeed is the other remarkable part of this experience, as the pictures are accompanied by excerpts from literary, philosophical and scientific sources of the last two thousand years (set in English, Icelandic, French and German), giving worthwhile testimony to man’s contact with ice.
“Icevisions” certainly is a book that gives the reader food for ample thought, given the current debate on global warming and the presently perceivable consequences of shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels.
Even without that, the regular ice-cube will never be the same again.
2 Annette Mulitze, Deutschland:
„Icevisions“ von Klaus Kretzer
123 Seiten, erschienen im Selbstverlag, Sjónarsker/Island, 2010
Über fünfzig Fotografien von Klaus Kretzer zeigen eindrucksvoll die Einzigartigkeit der Natur als Künstlerin. Von der weitläufigen Gletscherlandschaft Islands zoomt das viersprachige Buch in das Innere der Eisberge hinein. Die Klarheit der Aufnahmen ist inspiriert vom Motiv. Wie das Eis selbst fangen die Fotos das Licht ein, das Formen und Oberflächen sichtbar macht.
Zunächst lebt das Buch von den Bildern. Doch der in Island lebende Fotograf und Autor eröffnet nicht nur tiefe Einblicke ins Eis, sondern auch in die wissenschaftliche und die literarische Sichtweise des gefrorenen Elements. Mit Zitaten aus zurückliegenden Jahrhunderten – übersetzt ins Isländische, Deutsche, Englische und Französische – unternimmt der gebürtige Deutsche auch eine Art kulturgeschichtliche Exkursion. Der Leser wird von der „Faszination Eis“ angesteckt.
1 Dr. Michael Buss, Deutschland:
In welch unterschiedlichen Formen isländisches Eis existiert – das zeigt Klaus Kretzer in seinem fantastischen Bildband. In aller Formenvielfalt dominiert die Farbe Blau in ihrem weiten Spektrum von intensiv bis transparent. Ergänzt werden die einzigartigen Aufnahmen durch erstaunlich vielfältige Zitate, die zeigen, wie oft sich die Weltliteratur in das Gefrorene vertieft hat. Klaus Kretzer nimmt den Leser mit auf Reisen in die Klarheit der isländischen
Wasserwelten und in die Literaturgeschichte.
