Camille Seaman The Big Cloud
The Lovely Monster over the Farm, 19:15 CST, Lodgepole, Nebraska, 22 June 2012, 2012
Series
Seaman went chasing a type of giant cloud called a supercell, which can produce grapefruit-sized hail and spectacular tornadoes. Supercells can be up to 80km wide and 20,000m high, blocking out the daylight, creating a dark, ominous space beneath.
Seaman was not prepared for how overwhelming the experience could be — the smells of the charged particles, the sweetness of the grass and the pavement before it rains, the colours of the clouds and the light of the sky and the lightning.
It was important to remember the pain and destruction these storms inflicted on local people, never knowing when a tornado could come through. But Seaman’s images speak to the duality of all things — there is no creation without destruction, a cloud can be beautiful, terrible or both. There is no art more dramatic than that created by nature. At the end of the day, we are the storm.
About the photographer
Huntington, New York, 1969
American
Ølgod, Denmark
About Camille Seaman
Seaman graduated from the State University of New York, Purchase, in 1992 after studying photography with Jan Groover and John Cohen.
She gained widespread attention in 2006 with her series The Last Iceberg, which documents Arctic and Antarctic icebergs using a portraiture approach. Seaman continues to work on the effects of climate change and strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature.
She has held numerous group and solo exhibitions, and her series The Last Iceberg has been shown extensively in the United States and Europe, including at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC (2007 and 2008); the University of Delaware Museum (2008) and Hans Alf Gallery, Copenhagen (2009).
Seaman’s work has received numerous prizes including a National Geographic award in 2006 and a Critical Mass award in Portland, Oregon, for her monograph The Last Iceberg in 2007. She was a TED Senior Fellow (2011–15) and a Stanford Knight Fellow (2014) and was awarded a Fellowship by Cinereach in New York as Filmmaker in Residence (2016).
Seaman’s photographs have been published widely, including in National Geographic, German GEO, Italian GEO, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Newsweek, Outside Magazine (United States), Zeit Wissen (Germany) and Men's Journal (United States).