Guadalupe Laiz: “The Horse is a Reflection of Iceland”

In the Land of Fire and Ice broadens the frame of your first book, moving from the horse alone to the horse within its environment. Was that a natural evolution, or a deliberate intention from the start?

Guadalupe Laiz: It was both. When I created Horses of Iceland, I was completely captivated by the horse itself: its character, its spirit, its expressions. But over time I realized that to truly understand the Icelandic horse, you cannot separate it from the land that shaped it. The horse is a reflection of Iceland. The resilience, the beauty, the unpredictability, the quiet strength. They belong to one another.

As I spent more time in the country, I felt compelled to widen the frame and tell a larger story. The landscape was no longer simply a backdrop; it became a character in its own right. This book became an exploration of that relationship, of how place shapes life and how life, in turn, becomes inseparable from place.

You worked with local breeders to transport horses to iconic locations: Skógafoss, the Fagradalsfjall volcano. How do you negotiate that kind of logistics, and how much room do you leave for the unexpected?

Projects like this require an enormous amount of planning, trust, and collaboration. Nothing happens alone. Local breeders and horse owners became essential partners, helping us safely bring horses into locations that are often difficult to access.

But more than partners I will call them friends, because I built reciprocal and organic relationships with them over the years. These relationships turned every trip into an organic collaboration where both, the owners and I worked our hardest for the very same goal: to showcase these majestic horses in the best way possible.

I learned early on that if I become too attached to a specific outcome, I miss the moments that are actually unfolding in front of me. Some of my favorite photographs happened because conditions changed, weather arrived unexpectedly, or a horse reacted in a way I never anticipated.

The preparation gets you to the right place. The unexpected is what gives the image life.

Iceland is an extreme environment: raking light, brutal weather, difficult terrain. How does that shape the way you work, both technically and mentally?

Iceland teaches humility. There are days when the weather changes five times in an hour. Winds become so strong you can barely stand. Light appears for a few seconds and disappears just as quickly. Technically, it forces you to be prepared and adaptable. Mentally, it teaches patience and surrender.

I learned that the landscape does not care about my plans. The more I tried to control the experience, the more frustrated I became. The more I learned to work with the conditions rather than against them, the more rewarding the process became. Some of the strongest images in the book came from moments that initially felt like failures.

The drone footage brings an aerial perspective that ground-level photography simply cannot achieve. How did you think about the dialogue between your images and Kolbeinsson’s: two gazes and two altitudes for a same subject?

What I love about our collaboration is that we were telling the same story from different perspectives. My work often focuses on intimacy. I want to be close enough to feel the presence of the animal, to connect emotionally with it.

Kolbeinsson’s aerial imagery reveals something equally important: scale. From above, you begin to understand how horses move through the landscape and how deeply they belong to it. Neither perspective is complete on its own. Together they create a fuller understanding of Iceland, where the individual horse and the vastness of the land exist in constant conversation.

After five years of trips to Iceland for this single project, what does repetition change in the way you see the same animal and the same landscape?

At first, you photograph what is obvious. Then, if you stay long enough, you begin to notice what is subtle. Repetition strips away assumptions. It teaches you that a landscape is never truly the same, even if you return to the exact same place. The weather changes, the light changes, the season changes, and perhaps most importantly, you change.

Over five years, Iceland became less of a destination and more of a relationship. The photographs became less about documenting a place and more about listening to it. The longer I stayed, the less I felt I knew, and strangely, that opened the door to deeper work.

You work in both color and black and white. How do you choose between them? Is that a decision made in the field, or in the edit?

For me, that decision almost always happens during the edit. When color is essential to the emotional experience of the image, I keep it. Iceland offers extraordinary colors: volcanic reds, mossy greens, glacial blues, and dramatic skies.

Sometimes those colors are part of the story. But there are other moments when color becomes a distraction. Black and white allows me to focus on form, texture, movement, and emotion. It removes information and, in doing so, often reveals something deeper.

I don’t approach either as superior. They are simply different languages, and each photograph tells me which language it wants to speak.

Beneath the formal beauty, there is a dimension of conservation and witness. How do you carry both ambitions, the aesthetic and the documentary, without one overwhelming the other?

Beauty is often what invites people into a photograph. It creates a moment of connection. But if the work stops there, I feel I’ve missed an opportunity. My goal has never been to create beautiful images for their own sake. Beauty is the doorway. Beyond that doorway is a deeper conversation about our relationship with nature, what we stand to lose, and what still remains worth protecting.

I don’t separate aesthetics and conservation. For me, they are inseparable. People protect what they love, and they love what they feel connected to. If a photograph can create that connection, even for a moment, then it has the potential to become something more than an image. It becomes a reason to care. And in a world increasingly disconnected from the natural world, creating reasons to care feels more important than ever.

In the Land of Fire and Ice: Horses of Iceland by Guadalupe Laiz is published by Images Publishing, and is available at $125.