Pete McBride is an award winning photographer whose commercial and editorial work has taken him to 60 countries. His most powerful work, for me at least, started with a simple question ‘How long would it take the water in the local creek to reach the sea?’. That simple question led him on a 3 year, 1500 mile quest to document the colorado river from source to sea resulting in the book The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict
Watch Chasing Water below:
Why do we photograph? There are at least as many answers to this question as there are photographers. Chris Jordan‘s work shines a bright light on American Consumerism and it’s impact on the environment. The work that I most personally connect with are his photographs of the baby albatrosses on the Midway atoll in the pacific. The baby albatrosses’s stomachs are filled with plastic that their parents have mistakenly fed them with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch causing them to starve to death. The midway video can be seen below.
Robert Glenn Ketchum has been described by American Photo magazine as ‘the most influential photographer you’ve never hear of‘.
Ketchum has used his photography to champion environmental awareness much like his friend and mentor Eliot Porter had done. He has worked to shine a spotlight on areas as diverse as the Hudson River Valley, California’s Big Sur coast, Alaska’s Tongass rainforest, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River Valley and, most recently, to Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska. His work in Bristol Bay is in opposition to the proposed Pebble Mine which given it’s location would likely have a dramatic impact on the salmon fisheries in that area.
Beyond his environmental activism, Ketchum continues to explore the possibilities of the digital darkroom. Watch him describe some of his digital creations below.
Interview of Robert Glenn Ketchum from Robert Glenn Ketchum on Vimeo.
I had a birthday recently and one of the gifts that I received was Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, a retrospective of Burtynsky’s work that features essays by Lori Pauli, Kenneth Baker and Mark Haworth-Booth. An added bonus, for me at least, is an interview with the Burtynsky by Michael Torosian, originally published in the Lumiere Press title ‘Residual Landscapes‘. Burtnynsky’s work focuses on the impact of man on the landscape, his large format pictures of the damaged landscape, from mountains of tires to rivers of bright orange waste from a nickel mine, are really quite impressive but really make you stop and wonder what are we doing to the planet?
Burtynsky won the 2005 TED Prize, his TED presentation is in the video below. To find out more about Burtnysky click here.
