New Movie & Book – Chasing Ice – James Balog

Books, Video  Comment
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Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and opening in New York and Toronto Nov 9, Chasing Ice is a documentary feature, directed by Jeff Orlowski, that reveals the work of photographer James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) project. Balog, once a skeptic about climate change, discovers through EIS undeniable evidence of a warming world. Chasing Ice features hauntingly beautiful, multi-year time-lapse videos of vanishing glaciers, while delivering fragile hope to our carbon-powered planet.
Find out more about the film here.

A companion book is also now available. ICE: Portraits of the World’s Vanishing Glaciers (288 pages),celebrating the stupendous forms, colors and textures in arctic and alpine landscapes, will be released in the fall of 2012 in collaboration with Rizzoli, the world-renowned publisher of art books. Terry Tempest Williams, one of America’s most distinguished environmental writers and thinkers, will contribute the foreword.
Preview the book ICE here.
Find out more about photographer James Balog here.

Balog's Extreme Ice Survey at Iceland's Glacial Lagoon

Destination - Iceland, Workshop  Comment
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Jim Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey breaks new ground photographically.
I visited one of the locations featured in this video recently, Jokullsarlon – Iceland’s glacial lagoon, where I saw changes, and heard of even bigger changes from people who have lived there a lifetime and studied it closely. 40 years ago the ice went to the sea. 30 years ago the lagoon became more visible. Twenty years ago it retreated more. Ten years ago the lagoon was half as long. Today the area is experiencing more dramatic change. Things always change, but glaciologist provide data that things are changing faster than ever today. Fascinating! It’s worth paying attention to.
Find more climate change resources here.
Get priority status in my 2010 Iceland workshop.
Email info@johnpaulcaponigro.com.

James Balog – Extreme Ice Survey

Photographers  Comment
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Jim Balog has been doing an absolutely fascinating photographic project. He and a team of glaciologists have put cameras around the world and set them to take exposures every hour. The changes they’ve tracked have been astonishing – even to the most learned scientists! You’ve never seen anything like this. Few people have. Until now. This project is important photographically – it’s extended the way photographers work and think about developing projects. The focus on movement/change represented by still photographs, many presented as time lapse series moves us ever closer to blurring the lines between still and video. It’s a project of historic proportions in so many ways.
This project presents important evidence in the quest to understand climate change. Here’s the bottom line. “Over 100 million people live within three feet of sea level—the very amount that experts expect seas to rise by 2100. Cities will spend trillions on coastal defenses, low-lying regions such as Florida and Bangladesh will be devastated, and many island nations will cease to exist. Overall, the consequences will test our ability to adapt like never before.” The debate is not whether climate change is happening. 90% of scientists agree it is. The real debates are how much, how fast, how much is geophysical, how much man contributes, what we can do about it, and are we prepared to react to it.
Watch Extreme Ice here.
Learn more about James Balog here.
Balog ends the series in a place that has captivated me – Iceland.
Check out my Iceland workshop here.
See my work in Antarctica. Images. Text. Book.