A WINTER ELOPEMENT IN LOFOTENJamie & Christopher

This was, and still is, the coldest I have ever been with a camera in my hands.

Jamie and Christopher came to Lofoten from Philadelphia, which is a long way to travel to freeze. They had been together since high school, eight years by the time he proposed, first over dinner and then again in a park, with a ring hidden inside a book of poetry. When it came to actually getting married, Jamie did not want the big traditional wedding and the room full of people. She went looking for somewhere else entirely, found these islands in a set of my photographs, and that was that. Christopher, to his credit, said yes to the whole idea on the spot.

They had already done the legal part back home, signed and official before the flight, so the day in Lofoten was free of the admin and about nothing but the two of them. No guests, no schedule, no reception to get back for. Just Jamie and Christopher, me, a rental car, and a forecast that can only be called hostile.

The cold

Lofoten in March does not do things by halves, and that week meant snow, hail, and a wind straight off the Arctic.

The islands sit above the Arctic Circle, a run of granite teeth dropped into a black sea, and in winter there are only a few hours of thin grey light to work with. Leknes was the base, and from there it was a matter of driving until something looked impossible and then stopping to photograph it. Red fishing cabins with their stilts in the frozen water. A boat frozen in place until spring. Jamie out on a beach the colour of a tropical postcard, if you ignored the ice, in a dress that had no business being outside in March.

Out in the weather

The weather that week was relentless, and there was no point waiting it out.

Between the villages there are vast open stretches with the mountains set well back and nothing between you and whatever is coming off the sea. That day it was hail one minute and a hole of gold light the next. Jamie and Christopher leaned into it, literally, walking into a headwind with the dress cracking like a sail. At one point Jamie, who is frightened of heights, climbed a snow slope she wanted no part of because Christopher asked her to, and said afterward the view was worth it. There are drying racks out here too, hung with cod, the trade these islands have run on for a thousand years. Most couples I would keep well clear of them. These two I put right underneath.

Reine

Reine is the one you have seen whether you know its name or not.

Red rorbuer stacked at the foot of a mountain that comes to a point like something drawn by a child who was told to draw a mountain and got carried away. In summer it is elbow to elbow with tripods. That week the car parks were empty and the whole postcard was theirs, snow to the waterline, not another soul in it. I have photographed a lot of places. This is still the one people cross the world for.

Old wood, still water

Some of the best of it was the small stuff, old wood and still water.

There are rorbuer out here old enough that the timber has gone silver and soft, and Jamie stood against a wall of it in a wedding dress with a hundred years of weather behind her. When the wind finally dropped the fjords went to glass, and for a few minutes there were two of every mountain, one above the water and one in it. Then a beach or two the colour of somewhere much warmer, and back into the car with the heater going full.

The ice wall

The ceremony happened against a wall of ice at the side of a road, which by then felt like the only reasonable place for it.

Somewhere along one of the drives there was a cliff where the meltwater freezes as it falls and builds all winter into a blue wall thirty feet high. Christopher read his vows off a sheet of paper he could barely hold still, snow coming down sideways, Jamie laughing and freezing in roughly equal measure. There is a frame of the little book open on the snow, which felt right, given a book is how he asked in the first place. Nobody was there to see any of it, which was exactly how they wanted it.

The last of it

By the end nobody could feel their hands, and nobody wanted to stop.

Jamie’s one piece of advice afterward was to plan the wedding for yourselves and not for anyone else. Easy to say. Harder to do, unless you happen to be the sort who will fly to the Arctic in March to prove it. If that sounds like you, I know exactly where to point the car, and I would love to come along. Bring better gloves than I did.

Dress by BHLDN.