Baldur Bjarnason

Retro photos: millennial Reykjavík

– Baldur Bjarnason

I don’t often post older photos of mine, but here are a few that date from around 2000. I was working at the time as a vision mixer in the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, before and after their move from their old facilities at Laugavegur to their current facilities in Efstaleiti.

The street photos are taken in the Vesturbær neighbourhood.

All of this was shot on film using a battered old manual SLR camera.

A black and white photo of a black and white cat that's staring down a street' Cat lounging at the base of a power junction box, I think

I took these two photos just before the move. A documentary on Nobel laureate Halldór Laxnes was being broadcast as I was leaving work.

(We once had lunch with him when I was a kid. I didn’t know who he was and thought he was just a weird, incoherent old man at the time.)

A photo of the old TV newsroom. You can see the desks and the wall of screens showing both the current broadcast and other channels. The tiny newsroom filled with gear that was obsolete even then. You can see Laxnes's face on several screens.