Jessica Auer

Jessica Auer is a Canadian photographer and filmmaker who teaches photography at Concordia University in Montréal, and works from her studio in Seydisfjördur, Iceland. Her work is broadly concerned with the study of landscapes as cultural sites. Through a research-based practice, she examines our social, political and aesthetic attitudes towards place, including but not limited to – historical sites, tourist destinations, and small communities. Her work has been presented in several museums, galleries and festivals, such as the Canadian Center for Architecture, The Reykjavík Museum of Photography and the Cortona photography festival in Italy (COTM).

For over twenty years Jessica Auer has been photographing landscapes – environments that remain for the most part remote, undeveloped and typically quiet. She has lived in both Canada and Iceland, where large portions of land are uninhabited. She has travelled through Nordic regions where encounters with other people are few and far between. These places are however, not untouched. Her images propose that we, as humans, have dissolved the very notion of the frontier.

The Pond (autumn), 2020

The Pond (autumn) is an early image from an ongoing project titled The Heath. In 2019, the Icelandic government announced the construction of a 13.4 km tunnel to connect the fjordside village of Seyðisfjörður with the centralized town of Egilsstaðir. As a resident of Seyðisfjörður, Jessica has been documenting the changes in her surrounding environment by filming and photographing the overland route that will eventually be replaced by the tunnel.

Website: www.jessicaauer.com

Instagram: jessica.auer