James Balog (pronounced BAY-log) is an American photographer whose work revolves around the relationship between humans and nature. For nearly 30 years, James Balog re-defined environmental photography, whether his subject was endangered animals, giant trees, or Arctic ice sheets.
He is the author of seven books, including, Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report, published in March 2009. Among his other books are the spectacular 2004 release, Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest, and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife (1990), hailed as a major conceptual breakthrough in nature photography.
Balog is a founding Fellow[1] of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP)[2]
Balog's most recent project is a stunning look at the impact of climate change on the world’s glaciers. In 2007, Balog, who has a graduate degree in geomorphology, initiated the Extreme Ice Survey, the most wide-ranging ground-based photographic glacier study ever conducted. National Geographic magazine showcased Balog's work in June 2007 and June 2010, and the project is featured in the 2009 NOVA documentary Extreme Ice. Balog's latest initiative, Earth Vision Trust, is a new organization founded on the innovative methodology and cultural impact of the Extreme Ice Survey.
Balog has received many awards for his work, including a 2010 Heinz Award and the Missouri School of Journalism's Honor Medal for Distinguished Service for 2010. He was previously honored with the Aspen Institute's Visual Arts & Design Award, the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the Leica Medal of Excellence, and the International League of Conservation Photographers League Award. He was the North American Nature Photography Association's "Outstanding Photographer of the Year" in 2008, and in 1996, he became the first photographer ever commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to create a full set of stamps. The documentary film A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn (2006) explores his thoughts about art, nature, and perception. He is also the subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary, Chasing Ice.
He lives in the foothills of the Rockies above Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, Suzanne, and daughters Simone and Emily.
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Balog’s interest in nature originated in his early childhood. His fascination with wild places has affected everything he has done, including sports, exploration, the study of geology and his eventual career as an image creator.
While working on his undergraduate degree at Boston College, Balog became an avid adventurer. He made frequent trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the wilderness rivers of Maine, and would later graduate to larger climbing expeditions in the Alps and Himalayas, not to mention first ascents in Alaska.
As his outdoor adventures evolved, Balog increasingly felt a need to document his experiences. He began carrying a camera on his trips and teaching himself photography along the way. While working on a master’s degree in geomorphology at the University of Colorado, he honed his photography skills during frequent climbing trips.
As the completion of his geomorphology degree neared, Balog felt a yearning to leave behind the statistical analysis and computer modeling so prevalent in his field. In order to pursue a more direct, hands-on connection with the natural world, he decided to switch from the numbers driven world of science to a life in nature photojournalism. He began with a series of documentary photography assignments for various magazines,such as Mariah (the predecessor to Outside) Smithsonian and National Geographic. Work he continues today. Later, he would move into self-directed projects, many of which would ultimately lead to large format photography books. Over the years, Balog has tackled topics such as big-game hunting, endangered species and North America’s old-growth forests.
Balog’s work has primarily evolved as a combination of art, science and environmental documentary. Today, he views his imagery as exploring the “contact zone” between man and nature.
Among his many artistic influences, Balog counts Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams. Outside of photography, he draws inspiration from the entire range of arts, including music, literature, painting, filmmaking, sculpture and architecture.
Balog has been working in professional photography for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Life, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Audubon, Outside and numerous trade publications, such as American Photo, Professional Photographer and Photo District News. He was a contributing editor to National Geographic Adventure and is the subject of the short film "A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn". Assignments and personal projects have included documenting the aftermath of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, the 2004 tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia, Hurricane Katrina’s collision with the American Gulf Coast, the effects of climate change on the world's glaciers and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Disaster.
Balog has produced seven books: Wildlife Requiem, Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife, Anima, James Balog’s Animals A to Z, Animal, Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest, and Extreme Ice, Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report.
A major enterprise of Balog’s in recent years has been the Extreme Ice Survey. Since 2007, the project has used time-lapse photography, conventional photography and video to illustrate the effects of global warming on the earth’s glacial ice. Working with a team of scientists, videographers and extreme-weather expedition professionals, Balog and the EIS team installed 34 time-lapse camera systems at 18 locations in Greenland, Iceland, Nepal, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountains. The cameras are programmed to photograph once an hour, every hour of daylight. The Extreme Ice Survey team then assembles the images into video animations that demonstrate the dramatic retreat of the glaciers. Collected images are used for scientific evidence and as part of a global outreach campaign aimed at educating the public about the effects of global warming.
Balog's most recent endeavor has been the expansion of the Extreme Ice Survey into the Earth Vision Trust. The Earth Vision Trust (EVT) combines art and science to explore a changing planet, preserve its memory for future generations and inspire social action now.
“I’ve basically devoted my career to looking at the relationship between humans and nature, and to looking at nature,” said Balog in an interview with Photo District News. “To me, that’s the core of my mission, and it has been and it will be until I pass out of this world. I want to do what I can to shift human understanding of who we are and what we are and how we should relate to all the rest of what’s on this planet. I want to crack through the veneer of the illusions that surround us and see inside reality more purely than you normally get to see. That’s the real witchcraft and voodoo of this artistic process we’re in. I hope that the work helps people to think and see differently—and ultimately, we can only hope, behave differently.”
With the Earth Vision Trust(EVT), Balog uses the skills and knowledge garnered from years of photojournalism and science to create compelling artistic, fact-based, innovative communication projects that compellingly illustrate key environmental issues facing our planet and society. As the EVT grows, it will also become a home for like-minded professionals endeavoring to promote better awareness about our connections with and impacts on planetary ecosystems.
Balog’s artistic style varies between very clean, simple representations of his subjects and more impressionistic interpretations that illustrate his unconscious feelings about a scene. He tends to alter his treatments and techniques based on emotional responses to a subject and the circumstances surrounding his shooting.
Early in his career, Balog went through a period where he concentrated on man’s direct impact on nature. He produced a series on nuclear missile silos in the agrarian landscapes of the American West. He created numerous man-made landscape pictures. In Balog’s first book project, Wildlife Requiem, he examined the phenomenon of people killing animals for sport. Published in 1984, Wildlife Requiem shocked the photography establishment with its brutally graphic images.
“In a lot of my work I’m trying to make a commentary about humans encroaching on nature through their presence,” said Balog in an interview with Photo District News. “But I’m not so naïve as to think that my own presence is not an impact on the animals and plants and landscapes that I happen to enter. What I can do as a photographer, hopefully, is to help everybody else see their impact in a way that maybe they hadn’t before.” and thats about it
Balog views photography as a form of visual evidence that carries tremendous potential for influencing people’s perception of the world around them. “I’ve believed for a long time that photographers are like the antennae of civilization,” he said in a Professional Photographer magazine article. “We are an integral part of the sensing mechanism of the human animal. We are out there feeling in the darkness, trying to see what’s around us and reveal what hasn’t been revealed before. Not all photographers work that way, but to me that’s one of the central elements of photography. I would like to think that passionate, involved photographers would be looking at the world and trying their hardest to speak about the important things that are going on today.”
ANIMA series. Seeking to challenge humankind’s ancient cultural perception about its place in the world, Balog paired chimpanzees with a diverse range of humans and photographed a series of provocative portraits. The conceptual artwork draws on insights from a variety of fields, including visual arts, environmental philosophy and Jungian psychology. ANIMA asks readers to imagine a healthier, more integrated relationship between humans and nature.
Extreme Ice Survey. The Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) tells the story of a planet in flux. With innovative methodology that combines time-lapse imagery with cutting-edge science, EIS encompasses the world's most extensive ground-based photographic glacier study to date. More than 500,000 photographs reveal the extraordinary retreat of glaciers and ice sheets due to climate change, providing scientists with vital insights on glacier dynamics. Since 2007, EIS has installed 34 time-lapse cameras at 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Nepal, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains. EIS also conducts annual or bi-annual repeat photography in Iceland, British Columbia, the Alps and Bolivia. A PBS documentary, National Geographic book, National Public Radio and numerous magazines and newspapers have featured the EIS team. In addition, EIS spreads the word of climate change and shrinking glaciers through public talks, a touring exhibition and displays in public venues, including Denver International Airport. EIS has appeared before Congress and in multimedia presentations at science and policy conferences around the world. For more information, visit www.ExtremeIceSurvey.org.
Earth Vision Trust. Founded in the summer of 2010, the Earth Vision Trust (EVT) combines art and science to explore a changing planet, preserve its memory for future generations and inspire social action now. In much of the world, the natural environment of just a couple of generations ago was profoundly different from the environment we experience today. Similarly, much of what we see now will vanish by the time our grandchildren walk the Earth. EVT combines still photographs, video, and film with the written word and other media to preserve a visual record of fast-changing landscapes and critically endangered plants and animals. EVT disseminates this record to the global public using available forums, including the internet, electronic and print media, public presentations, and educational resources created for classroom use. As EVT grows, it will give voice to collaborators in a wide range of creative and scientific fields.
Holga series. Starting in 1997 and continuing intermittently through the present day, Balog has continued a series of photographs made with a Holga camera. Holgas are inexpensive, medium-format 120 film toy cameras that are made in China and appreciated for a low-fidelity aesthetic. Balog enjoys working with the imperfections in the exposures, such as vignetting and blur, and makes them part of the pieces. He actually wants the camera to produce little defects that will inspire new creative revelations.
Survivors series. Balog endeavored to change people’s perception of endangered wildlife by altering the context in which the animals were viewed. To accomplish this, he shunned the obvious approach of capturing his subjects in nature with a telephoto lens and instead photographed the animals in non-natural settings, often against white backdrops, to emphasize their vulnerability.
Techno Sapiens series. Balog explored the concept of Homo sapiens becoming increasingly dependent on technology in his conceptual series “Techno Sapiens”. The portfolio includes images that range from techno-fashion portraits to photographs depicting people's techno-habitats. Balog used a variety of techniques to create images that illustrate the changing features of human nature, as well as humankind's increasing detachment from the natural world. The duality of the pictures, a tension between beauty and horror, mimics the ambivalence most people feel for technology.
Tree series. For the Tree series, Balog wanted to photograph some of world’s tallest trees in their full grandeur, but he realized that his subjects were far too large to capture in a single frame. So he devised a multi-frame approach of photographing the trees from the top down. The method was inspired by some of the lunar landing pictures from the NASA missions during the 1960s. Balog would climb each tree, and then meticulously photograph them in sections as he rappelled downward. Later, he would create digital mosaics by stitching the images together using computer imaging software. Some images required up to three days of shooting, plus as many as six weeks of computer work to reassemble the final composition. The tree images eventually became a 2004 book release, Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest.
The Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) team has presented its multimedia story to policymakers around the globe.