The project Swimming Pool by Icelandic photographer Bragi Þór Jósefsson explores the relationship between architecture, landscape, and everyday life in Iceland through one of the most characteristic spaces in the country: swimming pools. Beyond their practical function, these spaces become places of encounter, observation, and quiet social interaction, where the intimate and the collective coexist in a natural way.

Through a clean, silent, and carefully composed visual language, Jósefsson documents these environments by paying close attention to geometry, colour, light, and human presence. The images convey a strong sense of calm and contemplation, while also speaking about Icelandic identity and the relationship between people, water, climate, and community. In these photographs, the pools become small stages where everyday life takes on a sculptural and almost minimalist dimension.

Jósefsson’s work exists at the intersection of documentary photography and the photography of constructed landscapes, where space is not simply a background but the true protagonist. Repetition of forms, the presence of steam, the contrast between cold exterior environments and warm water, and the way people inhabit these spaces together create a subtle narrative about how a society relates to its environment.

Bragi Þór Jósefsson was part of the Belgrade Photo Month programme last year with his project Iceland Defense Force, in which he explored the remains of the American military presence in Iceland and its marks on the landscape. While that project focused on memory, geopolitics, and territory, Swimming Pools approaches a more everyday and social aspect of the country, showing another side of Iceland and its visual culture.

Together, these projects reveal the artist’s interest in landscape as a carrier of history, identity, and ways of life, as well as his ability to transform seemingly ordinary spaces into images filled with meaning, silence, and presence.