James Balog
James Balog
James Balogis an American photographer whose work explores the relationship between humans and nature. Since the early 1980s Balog has photographed such subjects as endangered animals, North America’s old-growth forests, and polar ice. His work aims to combine insights from art and science to produce innovative, dynamic and sometimes shocking interpretations of our changing world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth15 July 1952
CountryUnited States of America
Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.
I'm quite fond of Switzerland. I love Switzerland.
You can't divorce civilization from nature - we totally depend on it.
Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine.
I've been to the Himalayas a half a dozen times and I love it. I'm just kind of tired of going literally twelve time zones around the world. I would rather go six time zones and get to Iceland or whatever it is.
I personally spend the majority of my time by far on outreach and education and fundraising and administration.
I've got at least two major project ideas that I've been chewing on for several years in my head and I've been trying to resist them both. But I have learned over the years that when they don't go away and they're still in there, you probably have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to do something about them.
I was raised a Catholic as a boy and went to a Catholic boys' high school, a private school, and kind of drifted away, candidly, in my latter teen years. I consider myself deeply spiritual but not in an institutional, religious kind of a way. In Catholicism, we're surrounded by these images of martyrdom and doing penance and doing some suffering to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And I certainly embedded that in my psyche and I have lived that very effectively.
Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves an essential spiritual and ethical question: Are we the kind of people who take everything for ourselves and leave nothing for others, or do the angels of our better nature still live? I believe the angels are still alive.
The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.
In some cases, I allow the edge of the set, the edge of my own artificial, artistic imposition, to show up because I don't want to hide from that. I want to acknowledge that there is a living human and a living eye and a living mind and a living heart responding to what's going on out there.
When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.
Each of us can and must shift our behavior according to our ability. For some, that means changing diet, shopping locally, or putting solar panels on their house. For others, it means using their voice to inspire transformative change.
I have often thought that my work with wildlife taught me the meaning of patience, and my work with the big trees taught me the meaning of humility, and my work with the ice has taught me the meaning of mortality.