Blog: Background Stories to the Photographs

The Madagascar Version of Paradise The two photographs from Madagascar in Earthforms, (pp. 72 & 73) are both of sandstone structures in the magnificent Parc d’Isalo on the southern part of the island. It had taken us two days to drive the 429 miles from the...

Genghis Khan (ca. 1158–1227), silent, authoritative, paternal, presides over present-day post-imperial, post-totalitarian, successfully democratic Mongolia, the most sparsely populated country in the world (pop. ca. 2.8 million; density 1.76/sq km), with a land area...

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...

I returned to Ireland last summer (2018) to see some of the things I missed in my grand tour of the the island the previous summer. The place is virtually inexhaustible, however. I was planning to see Connemara National Park, after spending the night in a small town...

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...

Every photograph in Earthforms has a story behind it and dozens more photographs that I took that day in that place. I could only offer a short summary in the captions in the back of the book, which also had to supply geological information. During my round-the-world...

On pages 42 and 43 of Earthforms there are two photographs of the Ice Canyon at Yolyn Am, Mongolia. Here is the story of the day I photographed them, May 13, 2014, during my trip around the world Our driver Ohchkee (who spoke no English) picked us up in his roomy SUV...

Badlands hold a strong fascination for me due to the plethora of FORM one finds there. Generally located in dry, desert terrain, the setting itself offers much to delight the eye. The desert surface displays dried and drying mud, petrified wood, scatterings of quartz...

I’m very proud that the venerable magazine Natural History (established in 1900), long associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has chosen to feature Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet as its June cover story. Editor Charles Harris...

Earthforms features four photographs from the Mingan Archipelago (Province of Québec, Canada), including the cover and the title page. These islands offered such an exceptional geological panorama, in such an unlikely place for most Americans, that they deserved the...

Here I am with a golden eagle on my arm in Mongolia. In the northwest of the country men hunt with trained golden eagles, and one fellow had one that he allowed to pose with tourists on the way to the Genghis Khan memorial outside of Ulaan Baator, May, 2014.