Cloughmore, Achill Island, County Mayo Coastline

Art, science and progressive politics—why should they be separate domains? Serious art is a way of knowing the world: how to get along with others, what's out there in the world, what to admire, what to be wary of—in short, how to live. Science explores the...

People often ask of photographer who produce eye-popping landscapes, "Did it really look like this?" The implication is that the photographer added some color intensity (saturation) and maybe cleaned up the scene a bit, so that it now looks closer to a movie set than...

As I demonstrated in my last post, we photographers are always processing our images to narrow the gap between what our sensors record and how we envision the subjects of our photographs. This may or may not be what we actually saw—if we remember it! There are many...

Abstract art in the 20th Century, especially Abstract Expressionism as it emerged from Surrealism in the 1940s in New York, has enabled us to appreciate much more than landscapes—scenic views from a distance—in the biophysical world. Much of my work in geological...