Extreme Weather in a Broader Context
With far too much irony, sadly with terrible fires north of San Francisco this past week, the EXTREME WEATHER portfolio went up on my website the week before. This is a project I have worked on for a number of years, that is primarily concerned with what is going on in an environment, as opposed to merely depicting how it looks on a sunny day with a light breeze. The project came to be, both based upon some intuition, and the climate/disaster models that began to turn up in scientific publications over a decade ago.
The initial impulse actually originated over twenty five years ago during an ascent in the Sierras where we were approaching the summit of Mt. Banner, in the Ritter Range, only to be forced off the mountain by thunder, lighting and falling rock. After that episode, I began to also photograph encroaching storms, besides the usual golden light landscapes most of us shoot. However, it has been El Nino alternating with droughts here in California over the last few decades that really helped the idea become an actual project.
As I implied in my last blogpost, Extreme Weather is actually more an umbrella term for a number of ongoing projects. It includes what would be termed classical wilderness type landscapes that concentrate on extreme events in relatively undisturbed environments, human intervention in the landscape that has gone awry, and also the RIM FIRE project, which initially was part of the first group noted above. Specific to the Extreme Weather posting on the website, all of the work is from the first group. To an extensive degree, these images concentrate either on actual severe weather events, or secondary outgrowths of such events, such as flooding, drought, desertification, and disease. The three photos above give some sense of the three differing aspects of the complete project above.
While the Extreme Weather portfolio is pretty extensive, in putting this web page together, the primary concerns were the actual types of events taking place, variation in habitat, and tonality. While the first two are immediately obvious, the tonality issue was a bit more complex than expected. Due to both Mother Nature and my unconscious tonal biases, the first edit was disproportionally green and orange dominated. When we tried to do the sequencing, and put the cover page for the project together it just did not work. Accordingly, some images did not make the cut this time. The West Portal photo that opens this blogpost is one of those images.
Sometimes without meaning to, projects teach us something that really takes us by surprise. In this case the lesson learned is that photos usually give us a fixed sense of place rather than reminding us change is constant, and it is not unusual for it to occur suddenly and with little warning.
