Big Cloud

Description

Our culture is addicted to weather: hourly forecasts, apps, radio, TV channels, alerts, warnings, and watches. And understandably-our food, clothing, livelihoods, and, increasingly, safety are tied directly to the weather and climate change.In The Big Cloud, photographer Camille Seaman stands in front of tornados, at the edges of lightning storms, and in pelting hail under pitch-black skies to capture supercells and mammatus clouds in their often sublime and terrifying splendor. In these awe-inspiring photographs, Seaman's work is a potent reminder that there is no art more dramatic, in scale or emotion, than that created by nature. The Big Cloud includes an introduction by award-winning New Yorker science writer and author Alan Burdick (Out of Eden, Why Time Flies).|Our culture is addicted to weather: hourly forecasts, apps, radio, TV channels, alerts, warnings, and watches. And understandably-our food, clothing, livelihoods, and, increasingly, safety are tied directly to the weather and climate change.In The Big Cloud, photographer Camille Seaman stands in front of tornados, at the edges of lightning storms, and in pelting hail under pitch-black skies to capture supercells and mammatus clouds in their often sublime and terrifying splendor. In these awe-inspiring photographs, Seaman's work is a potent reminder that there is no art more dramatic, in scale or emotion, than that created by nature. The Big Cloud includes an introduction by award-winning New Yorker science writer and author Alan Burdick (Out of Eden, Why Time Flies).

Camille Seaman is a TED Senior Fellow whose 2013 TED Talk on her photographs of supercell storms has garnered more than 1,500,000 views. Her previous book was Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our Endangered Polar Regions. She has received a National Geographic Award, and her photographs have appeared in publications including Time, the New York Times and Men's Journal. Alan Burdick is staff writer at The New Yorker, which he joined in 2012, first as a senior editor, then as the editor of Elements, their science-and-tech blog. His first book, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Overseas Press Club Award.

"Photographer Camille Seaman's images of icebergs as entities gnawed by climate change are a window on the world of fast-disappearing polar ice (see J. Hoffman Nature 492, 40; 2012). Here, she turns to a phenomenon even more evanescent: the storm cloud. Carefully avoiding "disaster tourism", Seaman captures stupendous storm fronts, from supercells to baby tornadoes, across South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska - a record of meteorology under the cosh of a shifting climate, and a homage to untameable nature." -- Nature.com ""I feel a sense of belonging. Not because I'm photographing, but because I am present and realise that our experience as humans on this planet is limitless," replies Seaman when asked what she has learned (and what she hopes others will learn) from her photographic series The Big Cloud. Recently published by Princeton Architectural Press, the book is both beautiful and shocking in its portrayal of Seaman's experiences as a storm chaser." -- Dazed "These images are no less impressive than her previous works and communicate the tumultuous vastness of our awe-inspiring world." -- Amateur Photographer "For the past 10 years California based photographer Camille Seaman has sought out some of her country's most extreme meteorological events and captured them on camera. Photographing brewing hurricanes, tornados and supercell storms, Seaman has documented incredible displays in some of the most challenging, yet beautiful, conditions. Here we see a selection of her most enigmatic works, all shot on America's great plains." -- Outdoor Photography "Hearing a tornado is on its way, most people turn and flee. Not Camille Seaman. For seven years the National Geographic Award-winning photogrpaher has been capturing the drama and beauty of extreme weather conditions. Now her images of swirling clouds and brooding skies, slashed by lightning bolts, have been published as a book." -- RPS Journal