Named in reference to a 15-year-old article by Firouz Gaini, an affiliate professor of anthropology at the College of the Faroe Islands, the photos in Atlantic Cowboy mirror this belief. Portraits of men at work and play supply an perception into masculinity in fixed flux. Youthful generations grapple with their incapacity to kind the conventional household items as soon as so valued by their dad and mom and grandparents. In the meantime, older men try to alter to a society wherein the values on which their forefathers’ identities have been constructed – energy, braveness, Christian morality and dedication to fishing which characterise the ‘Atlantic Cowboy’ – are more and more pushed to the fringes.
“What I discovered each distinctive and touching is that when missing their very own little tribes, they search different types of companionships,” Gjestvang remembers of her time amongst Faroese men. Particularly she remembers two brothers, 68-year-old Klæmint and 65-year-old Nicodemus, who, each single, stay collectively of their childhood house. Every day Klæmint goes to work as a fisherman whereas Nicodemus stays at house. When the youthful man sees his brother’s boat returning to the harbour, he begins to cook dinner their dinner: potatoes, whale meat and whale blubber, accompanied by a glass of milk.
This much less conventional, although clearly devoted, sort of familial relationship is mirrored many occasions in Atlantic Cowboy. Right here, notes on Gjestvang’s topics present how the dynamics of the Faroe Islands’ massive, shut knit households have been disrupted by women unhappy with the choices of island life, and by men unwilling – or unable – to change. “You look out the window, you see the massive mountains, after which on the wall in the front room there shall be work of the similar factor,” the photographer says of the properties of those Faroese men. “It’s virtually like they’re married to the panorama.”
