"Photographer James Balog gives an overview of his career in his big new book, “The Human Element: A Time Capsule From the Anthropocene.”"
"For many travelers at Denver International Airport, seeing James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey—timelapses constructed from hundreds of photos of glaciers retreating around the world, which ran for years on screens in the airport’s terminals—highlighted a contradiction. Viewers could watch the rivers of ice that are critical to the Earth’s ability to support life vanish before their eyes on their way to and from flights that are one of the drivers of the warming melting the glaciers.
Balog’s photography has always inspired “cognitive dissonance”—the mental and emotional discomfort that comes with holding conflicting beliefs and attitudes. Learning that the photographer who has for decades documented the impacts of the warming climate, from Hurricane Katrina to California wildfires, descended from a family of Pennsylvania coal miners can inspire such dissonance. So can learning that the man who made iconic photos of species endangered by human actions grew up hunting.
Such contradictions aren’t so much questions that arise from Balog’s photography and writing, but what have driven him to create them. Long before anthropocene was proposed as a term to explain the geologic age in which humans are the most defining force of the planet, he was documenting what the word described for National Geographic, Time, the New York Times Magazine and many other publications. The Earth Vision Institute he founded allowed for the type of long-term focus that a new geologic era would require. The documentaries “Chasing Ice” and “The Human Element” took his big ideas to the big screen."
James Blalog shares photographs in Inside Climate News December 5, 2021. Intro by Michael Kodas.
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