Roni Horn's To Place is one of the most epic and ambitious of artist's books, so much so that describing it in a few paragraphs is a challenge. Each book in the series is different, dealing with a separate theme. The first volume is not even photographic, yet To Place deserves to be treated as a unified whole, for there is both an overriding concept and a shared subject matter - Ísland (Iceland).
It is a country that fascinates the New York-based Horn and one to which she returns regularly to renew and extend her fascination in the form of fresh bodies of work. Iceland is her subject matter, but her subject, her primary theme insofar as it can be articulated, might be said to revolve around identity - how the identity of a place is formed, both materially and symbolically, visibly and invisibly; how a person's identity is shaped by place; how a person can change identity from place to place. Each book focuses on different aspects of this overarching theme, the relationship between Horn and Iceland.
Haraldsdóttir, Part Two, is the tenth volume in this series. It is related to Haraldsdóttir, which was published in 1996. Using water as context, photographs of a woman create an intimate but ambiguous portrait where the face becomes the place. Haraldsdóttir, Part Two contains one hundred photographs of the same subject taken fifteen years later.
