Rebekka's photos

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is my new hero.

Her photos on flickr are outstanding, and she's now joined the next in a short line of people who have impressed so well on the internet that it looks like they may be able to use it as a launch pad for a real career. She has been written up in various places, including the Observer this week, and there's a nice interview from fellow snapper Christopher Austin's photography 360 blog. She now has a contract from Toyota and interest from various top-flight journals.

Rebekka has a lot going for her. A photography student in her native Iceland, she has only been playing with a camera and photoshop for about two years, but she manages to combine warm, arty and stylish shots of her incredible Icelandic landscapes and light, with a revealing and tender range of self portraits which connect perfectly with the world wide web's blogging confessional nature. Intelligent and strikingly good looking, Rebekka is partnered up and has two young sons but lists herself as a single mother, making herself immediately attractive to the male internet hoards (see the nipplegate furore) and an inspiration to women (her current partner is not the children's father).

She also spent 8 years when young in the USA, so combines the cool icelandic weirdness with western metropolitan chic, again making her easily digestible to the internet art crowd.

But without talent, all would be for nought, and one look at her pictures and it's immediately obvious that this is no ordinary photography undergraduate. The woman has talent a-plenty.

The way she captures the shape of the landscape, and the fantastic light. Her way with objects and people that float through the air, like in a dream. Her self-portraits are stunning, and this is a great photographic portfolio, completely divorced from both the materialistic or glamour (despite her odd professed admiration for David Lachapelle) and also the pretentious and arty.

She also has superbly eclectic taste in music (dubstep, drum'n'bass, hiphop, aphex twin, soul, jazz, led zeppelin, beatles, eighties stuff) and excellent taste in knit-wear!

In simple terms, Rebekka just possesses down-to-earth cool and is the creator of simply beautiful art. Long may that continue.