#6: THE BEACH ON AUCTION IN SUPPORT OF THE SANTA AGUILA FOUNDATION. | May 9, 2010

On the 19th of May, The Santa Aguila Foundation (www.coastalcare.org) is organizing a fundraiser at the Hermes store in Beverly Hills. I am donating a print from my series, The Beach, to be auctioned off in support of the cause.

The foundation is spearheaded by Olaf and Eva Guerrand-Hermes, who have generously supported me in the past by acquiring a number of my prints.

The Beach was shot on a remote peninsula on the Westfjords of Iceland in October 2002. I brought a team of ten people out there on a borrowed coach that had been turned into a sleeper. We got there at 3 in the morning and drove the coach straight into a ditch. Being too tired to deal with it in the dark, we went to sleep.

The following morning it started snowing. We spent the day shooting on the beach, but because of the cold weather we could only shoot in short bursts before the girls turned purple. Fortunately there was an old geothermal pool down by the sea where we kept the girls warm between shots. By the time we finished, the problem of getting the coach out of the ditch remained.

A local farmer brought his tractor and pulled us out, but in the process the coach crashed into the tractor, severely damaging both vehicles. At that point it was quite late in the evening and the already treacherous mountain roads were iced over. The coach was equipped with tires that struggled on wet tarmac, let alone on the steep and icy mountain roads, so the hero farmer ended up pulling the coach over the mountain pass.

He took us to an old herring factory that moonlights as an inn, where we cooked loads of pasta and got drunk. After promising the farmer that I’d sort out the repair for his traumatized tractor, we headed back towards Reykjavík early the next morning in our severely banged up coach.

It took me a year to pay off the damages to the two vehicles, in installments, but the pictures turned out great.

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