Iris Halloway

I grew up in a fishing town on the Olympic Peninsula, ninety minutes from the nearest stoplight, and learned to read weather before I learned to read fast. My father was a commercial salmon fisherman; my mother painted the harbor in oils. Photography sat between the two — record-keeping that also wanted to be beautiful.

I studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri, spent four years on the picture desk at a regional daily in the Pacific Northwest, then went freelance in 2018 when long-form magazine work started to come in faster than the desk could release me. Since then I have worked for The Atlantic, Harper's, Topic, and the long-running quarterly that publishes my Iceland project in installments.

Most of my long projects sit between landscape and documentary — places where the land has done something to the people who live on it. Frame Notes is where I put the work that isn't commissioned: the ideas I am turning over, the projects that haven't found a home yet, and the single frames that won't leave me alone.

I split the year between a small flat in Reykjavík and a railroad apartment in Brooklyn. I shoot mostly medium-format film for personal work — a Mamiya 7 II and a battered Pentax 67 — and a Leica Q3 when I need to move quickly. Black-and-white is processed at home; color goes to a lab in Long Island City that has not let me down since 2019.

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