by Cornelia Feye
October 24, 2023

James Balog is a nature photographer traveling around the world for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and the Smithsonian Institute in search the best nature shots. Until he realized he was actually photographing portraits.
Portraits of survivors. Surviving endangered animals, trees, glaciers, coral reefs, and technically enhanced humans.
It all began in 1987 here in San Diego at the Wild Animal Park, where Balog rode in the back of a pick-up truck photographing the animals. A rhino ambled over and laid its head onto the tailgate of the pick-up right in front of Balog. They looked each other in the eye, and a moment of recognition took place, from one citizen of this planet to another.
Balog decided to take a series of portraits of endangered animals in front of a white backdrop, as they are used for fashion shoots. In front of this background, the animals looked alienated, isolated from their natural habitat. They also looked precious, like supermodels posed and presented to the viewer as symbols of valuable commodities.

However, Balog wanted to avoid eye contact between the animals and the viewer, to prevent “cuteness or sentimentality” as he explained. But then the gray Florida Panther happened. At the time, in 1989, there were only two of his species left. Balog lay on the ground in front of the panther before the white backdrop to take a picture. “Wasn’t there anything between you and the big cat?” I asked, a bit worried for his safety. Panthers can weigh well over 250 pounds and have powerful jaws. “No,” Balog said completely unconcerned. “Somewhere in the back of the room there was a noise and the panther snapped to attention. I took the shot and here it is.” The panther looks at the camera with absolute self-confidence, totally in charge of the image and the situation. There is no doubt, that this cat owns the picture, no mistaking him for a victim or a cute cat.
“After that,” Balog says, “I knew I could take powerful portraits of these endangered species.” In the exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Art, James Balog: Photographs from the Anthropocene, on view until March 10, 2024, the panther shares a gallery with primates, a rhino, and elephant, a panda, turtles and others. The happy end of the story is that the Florida panthers have recovered. There are now believed to be 200 of them roaming in the wild again. Did Balog’s picture help? Maybe, it certainly didn’t hurt.
The exhibition is divided into different groups of survivors, from animals, to trees, to coral reefs, to glaciers, to firefighters, and techno humans.

The glacier project is far reaching in space and time. It began with a photoshoot of a glacier in Iceland for The New Yorker in 2005. After hiking in and taking breathtaking shots of the ice, Balog and his team were just about to pack up their equipment, when it occurred to them that monitoring the glacier should be a permanent process. Like the growths of tree, glaciers move too slowly for the human eye to notice, but the camera can enhance our view, through time-lapse photography and repeated visits to the same sites. Balog partnered up with the Icelandic Glacier Society to enlist tourists on the popular Golden Circle tour of Iceland to take photos of the glaciers from marked spots and send them in per QR code to add to the archive of glacier melts.
The following year, National Geographic sent Balog to a multitude of glaciers from Bolivia to Switzerland to take photographs and set up permanent cameras at various glacier sites. The film footage of glaciers melting within a few minutes before our eyes in the exhibition took 17 years to collect. With a multitude of scientists and collaborators, Balog founded the www.earthvisioninstitute.org and created an extensive archive documenting the disappearance of glaciers, leaving little more than puddles. You have to see it, to believe it.
The glacier project had a glittering side effect: Ice diamonds—shimmering, dislocated ice pieces washed up on beaches. Balog took brilliant pictures of them, in the cold light of nights in Greenland and Iceland. They are survivors too, the last remains of melting icebergs. The name “Ice Diamonds” Balog gave them stuck. Now the beach where he found them is referred to as Diamond Beach.
“We humans are losing the memory of what makes nature natural. The amnesia spreads from one generation to another, as human tectonics gnaw away at the landscape.”
– James Balog
Photographs can preserve memory; they document what is disappearing. Memory is a big theme for Balog. Trees are bearer of memories. Old trees, like giant sequoias, or ancient oak trees can be between 1600 and 4000 years old. The oldest living beings on this planet.

“Trees have a presence, they carry the weight of history,” Balog says. In their trunks they store the memory of thousands of years: storms, fires, heat waves, ice, sun, insects, surrounding flora and fauna, changing temperatures and the presence of humans. In the Grove of the Titans in Northern California, a boardwalk around 2000-year-old Redwood trees had to be built, to protect their shallow roots from the trampling feet of human visitors.
Balog struggled with how to photograph a Giant Sequoia tree, 275 ft high, 28 ft circumference at the bottom. He finally managed to climb the tree with help from Humboldt University Scientists who provided rock climbing skills and equipment. Shooting a crossbow with a fishing line over branches 100 ft up, they pulled through stronger and stronger rope until they could climb up the limbs from there. But to photograph the tree face to face, Balog had to propel himself from a neighboring tree on a line in between the two giants, taking frame after frame, 450 in total. He remembers the day, December 28, 2001, a very cold and overcast day which provided the desired white background to contrast the green branches. He couldn’t walk or move his arms from the cold after reaching solid ground again. But, after putting all the images together, he created one of the most striking images in the exhibition.
In pursuit of his nature portraits, Balog did not only climb a 30-story-high tree, he also dove 70 ft under water to capture a coral reef near the island of Bonaire, in the Caribbean. Underwater photography loses color the deeper you go, because the sunlight cannot penetrate the water anymore. Human eyes see only blue after more than 20 ft. Therefore, Balog had to take close-up shots of each part of the reef with underwater strobe lights. He and his team created a grid on the reef with ropes, so they could keep track of what was already photographed. The team took days with 2-3 dives per day, shooting as long as the oxygen lasted, which became shorter the deeper they dove. The individual images were combined into a giant, collage or patchwork, depicting an impressive image of the entire reef in all its details. Another example of human vision extended by the camera.
One image in the endangered animal section puzzled Balog. It’s of a giant Asian Elephant covered by a white curtain. Why, he wondered, was this image so powerful? You can’t even see the elephant, only its outline through the curtain. While browsing through Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he happened to find an image of the Indian elephant god Ganesh. Ganesh, Campbell writes, pierces the curtain of illusion. That was the answer. But what illusion is he piercing? The illusion of separation between us and nature. Nature is not something out there, unconnected with us. It is part of us and we’re part of it. Balog’s portraits bring us face to face with species in flora and fauna with whom we share this planet. We look at them, and they look back. Have we been good fellow citizens?
This exhibit is not to be missed. It is not only visually beautiful and powerful, but also thought-provoking, insightful and important for our relationship with the natural world.
James Balog: Photographs from the Anthropocene
September 16, 2023–March 10, 2024 at Museum of Photographic Art @ SDMA Balboa Park



