James Balog: Breakthroughs
"I'd been looking at the power of nature my entire career," James Balog says of his trip to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in January. "The tsunami was something I needed to see."
The tsunami struck on December 26, 2004, and for the next two weeks the devastation was a news story for photographers who traveled to Indonesia on assignment for magazines, newspapers, wire services and Internet sites. Jim wasn't able to get there until a month later, but an assignment was not his motivation. "It was a once in a lifetime opportunity," he says. "I'll probably never again see the result of such a powerful natural event."
He spent a week in Banda Aceh, taking photographs (the first five images here are among those he made) and helping with recovery efforts. "There were pictures everywhere I'd turn," he says. "Visually it was intense, a barrage of impressions. I couldn't stop photographing. Then at night I'd grit my teeth and cringe. I knew it was so visually rich because of so much sadness and horror. I was thinking, there are pictures everywhere, but look at what I'm photographing."
Jim photographed not only the devastation, but also the work of body recovery teams, at times assisting them. "I was shell shocked for a couple of weeks when I got back," he says. "I felt unreal and dislocated. There's always physical fatigue and jet lag, but this was way beyond that. I had these constant flashbacks. The first thing I'd think about when I woke up was Banda Aceh. The last thing I thought about before I fell asleep was Banda Aceh. And all day long I'd think about the chaos and death."
What will always stay with him, he believes, is a reordering of his perception of the world from the vantage point of a privileged life lived in the United States. "The things we have attached so much emotional intensity and so much importance to," he says, "are so unbearably trivial. The other day I had a car accident—it's a brand new car, doesn't even have plates. I got really angry, and then ten seconds later, I thought, Jim, remember those cars in Banda Aceh? Remember the survivors who were trying to find the remainders of their lives in those cars? One guy was picking through the ruins of his car. His house had been wiped out, and I don't know what had happened to his family. His car was completely mangled, yet he was digging through the glove box trying to find something—I don't know what, something that had some meaning and importance to him. And there were hundreds of cars like that in the midst of ruined houses, some of the cars with bodies in them.
"And I looked at my car and thought, this doesn't matter, man; just let it go."
Jim's images have been widely exhibited and collected and have been published in countless magazines, including National Geographic and Smithsonian. His work was featured in A Day in the Life of America and
A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union, and he has published several books, including Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife and, most recently, Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest.
Ideas and concepts are at the heart of much of his work; they fire his imagination and fuel his energy. "Magazine assignments are more oriented toward literal documentation," he says, "but for my personal projects and my books, the idea is key. I don't touch a camera until I start to have a pretty clear vision of at least an initial step that seems fresh and interesting. I know there will be many steps beyond that vision, and that it might become something very different eventually, but I try to make sure that before I set out there is something new to it."
Jim began his career with what he calls "straight, mainline nature photography" in an attempt to emulate the nature photographers, like David Muench, whose work he most admired. "After about three years, I realized that there was a much bigger issue to tackle," he says, "and that was the boundary between humans and nature. That remains my leitmotif for the two-plus decades since. To me, the really interesting story has been, and will continue to be, that boundary in all its different manifestations."
And so, in Survivors Jim created elegant studio and location portraits of animals to produce a provocative book in which the artificiality of the settings and poses suggests the eventual fate of the animals. They are images, he wrote, "of animals in exile from [a] lost Eden." And in Tree (from which photos six through nine here are taken) he employs a variety of techniques and treatments to present the results of a six-year effort to photograph the tallest, strongest, most massive trees in America. The images range from the results of a portrait studio in the forest to intricate mosaics, many of which required over one hundred separate images of each tree; some of the giant redwoods required 600 frames.
"I don't think there's much more to say visually about pure nature," Jim says. "We know what running gazelles look like. We know what happy polar bears looks like and what rocks and trees look like. But what we don't know is how to truly understand those subjects. That's the boundary.
"In nature photography we're really very short on new visual ideas. Nature is what some people call a secular religion in this country, and if it is, then nature photographs are icons. They are what we see, what we feel and what we're supposed to believe in." Jim's images in Survivor and Tree are attempts to go beyond iconic representations so that as a culture, we might start to rethink our relationship to nature. "It's vital for our survival," Jim says.
Jim went to Indonesia with no thought of how the photographs he would make there might be different from those captured by any other photographer. "I didn't have a clear idea of what I would do that would be any different from the news guys shooting for Newsweek or Time. The literal news reporting was already being done, and I didn't have a fresh concept or vision. But I knew regardless of the way I photographed, I had to be there, I had to see it. I had an idea that multi-frame mosaics, like I did on the tree project, might communicate a sense of scale and fragmentation, in the same way the tsunami fragmented the buildings. I thought that might be an effective way to express it, and in fact it worked. I think it was successful."
Seventeen years ago Jim made a studio photograph of an elephant for Survivors. It's become something of a signature image. It's the last photo you see here.
"I had been exploring a lot of different treatments using fabric and partially opaque plastic and working with lights behind and in front of the animals to project shadows. When we started that shoot I'd already photographed elephants in the studio three or four times. I sketched my idea: the elephant standing behind the curtain and his shadow on the curtain cast by backlighting. We had him stand there, facing to the right as you saw him from the camera position."
Jim took the photos, but, he says, they weren't very interesting. "The idea I'd sketched didn't work. Then as I was standing there, thinking about what to do next, he turned 90 degrees to his right and walked through the curtain. The lights were still on, and as he walked through my eyes just popped open. My god, look at that! We asked the trainer, can you get him to do that again? We did a few takes, but the first was the best. The photograph was in the Survivors book and was featured in National Geographic's story on the work, and it was in the museum exhibitions."
The picture proved to be a haunting, powerful image. "But I didn't know what to make of it when I first shot it," Jim says. "It was out of the box to what was in the rest of the book, but it had a weird, eerie power. Certainly the moment when that elephant came through the curtain had that power. I was just amazed at the feeling, and over time I've come to realize that what that picture is expressing is absolutely at the center of things: that's nature coming through the veil of illusion, trying to make itself manifest in a different form, in a different way of understanding.
"I began thinking of it in those terms because I read in an anthropologist's study of myth and religion that the core function of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesha, in the human psyche is to help humanity penetrate the veil of illusion. Those were the words I read, five years after I shot the photograph.
"And that's why, today, the elephants picking through the ruins of Banda Aceh are so powerful, also. That's nature coming back to reclaim its own from the rubble of civilization. Here is nature reexamining what used to be and wondering what's coming next."
In the Bag
Jim is currently shooting with a D70 and D100, and is looking forward to working with the new D2x. A favorite lens is the 17-35mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S Zoom-Nikkor—"it's perfect for 'inside the crowd' scenes because I'm able to get close to the action without making the photograph look bent or stretched." Photographing in Banda Aceh, Jim used the 17-35 and a 50mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor almost exclusively.
