Welcome to Iceland Guest - Your Online Travel Guide.

Iceland Guest is an information website for your travel to Iceland. On this site you can get all the tourist information you need for your vacation in Iceland. We hope that you will find this online travel guide useful in planning your holidays in Iceland.

About Iceland
Iceland is a refreshingly unconventional travel destination. The Icelandic nature is unspoilt, exotic and mystical with its spouting geysers, active volcanoes, tumbling waterfalls, towering mountains, vast lava plains and magical lakes. Iceland’s fjords, glaciers and highland plains present visitors with some of the most beautiful and enchanting places they will ever see, as well as a rare feeling of utter tranquillity.

For travelers on a quest for action, Iceland’s pristine nature offers great potential for outdoor activities such as snowmobiling, horse riding, cave exploring, hiking, swimming, skiing, river rafting, kayaking and mountain safaris on modified four-wheel drives, to name but a few. Iceland supports a surprisingly diverse Nordic flora and fauna and is an ideal place for ornithology enthusiasts, while also offering some of the world’s best whale watching destinations.

About Reykjavik
Reykjavík sometimes feels like a cosmopolitan capital and a tiny seaside village - all wrapped up in one. But Reykjavík has the best of both worlds; the qualities of a modern, forward-looking society complemented by a close connection to Iceland‚s beautiful and unspoilt nature.

Reykjavík’s legendary nightlife is bolstered by plentiful cultural and social happenings in addition to an abundance of first-class restaurants. The size of Reykjavik city centre is also limited enough to allow for easy navigation by foot. Reykjavík has been described as a young and daring city that is characterized by strong contrasts. Conveniently small, clean and safe, it is more or less free from the major problems that haunt many other capitals. Big city events are frequent, the winter lights festival finished recently with thousands of participants and more tourist at this time of the year than we are used to.

Museum and Culture

Reykjavik Museum of Photography - Grófarhús Tryggvagata 15, Reykjavik

Reykjavik Museum of Photography

About the museum
The Reykjavík Museum of Photography is Iceland's only autonomous photographic museum. Its role is to preserve photographs, glass plates, negatives and slides in such a way that the people of Reykjavík and visitors have optimum access to the museum's collection. The museum is also intended to collect and preserve Icelandic photographs, which shed light on the history of photography, catalogue, and exhibit its collection. The museum shall seek to acquire photographic archives, which reflect the Icelandic photographic heritage, and photographic material with relevance to Reykjavík.

The museum's objective is to present both historical and contemporary photography in an artistic, social and cultural context, and to nurture public and scholarly interest in photography and photographic culture.

The guiding principle of the Reykjavík Museum of Photography is that the museum will grow as a photographic museum in an international context, and awaken the widest possible interest in the cultural role of photography.

Exhibitions
The Reykjavík Museum of Photography holds an average of three exhibitions each year, on the sixth floor of Grófarhús. The objective of such exhibitions is to present photographs from the museum's own collection and historical and contemporary photography, from Iceland and abroad. Exhibitions have included the works of Icelandic photographic pioneers Magnús Ólafsson, Guðmundur Ingólfsson and Leifur Þorsteinsson, as well as the worldrenowned Henri Cartier-Bresson, August Sander and Mary Ellen Mark. A number of group exhibitions have been held, such as the summer 2004 exhibition New Realities; Finnish Contemporary Photography.

Collections
The Reykjavík Museum of Photography seeks to collect photographs, objects and sources relating to the work of photographers, both professionals and amateurs, who have lived and worked in and around Reykjavík. It also seeks to collect and preserve photographs, objects and sources from the general public, such as photo albums and other items, which reflect photographic culture in the home.

Publications
The Museum attaches great importance to publications. In addition to catalogues published for every exhibition, two fine photographic books have been published, in Icelandic and English. Since 1998 the museum has held an annual lecture in memory of photographer Magnús Ólafsson; the lectures are given on 10 May each year (Magnús' birthday), then published the following year.

Photoweb
In June 2004 the Reykjavík Museum of Photography opened a new Photoweb, which now contains over 4,000 photographs in the museum's collection. The objective of opening the photoweb is to improve the museum's service to the public, and to bring to photographic history and the culture heritage to a wider public by providing direct access to the museum's photographs. See webaddress below.

Education
Museum education is an important part of the museum's work. It is organised with the aim of promoting knowledge and understanding of the collection of both historical and contemporary photography. Museum education is of two kinds: on the one hand, presentation of the museum's work, and on the other, presentation of information on the current exhibition. An interactive museum ed ucation page is to be opened on the museum's website in the autumn of 2005.

Opening Hours
Open weekdays 10:00 - 16:00.

Gallery hours
Open 12:00 - 19:00 weekdays, 13:00 - 17:00 weekends.

Admission
Admission is free.

Reykjavik Museum of Photography
Grófarhús,
Tryggvagata 15, 6th floor
101 Reykjavík
Iceland
Tel. 563 1790
Fax. 563 1799
E-mail: photomuseum@reykjavik.is
Webstie: www.ljosmyndasafnreykjavikur.is