PDN Photo of the Day » Aerial

Red-Hot (7 photos)

Amber Terranova — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:00:23 +0000

All Photos © Carsten Peter/National Geographic. Above: The lava at Nyiragongo is made of an alkali-rich volcanic rock; its unusual composition may be a factor in the lava’s fluidity.

Photographer Carsten Peter descended into the fiery center of Nyiragongo—an active volcano towering over a city of one million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—for the April issue of National Geographic magazine. See Carsten and his team explore the depths of Nyiragongo in Man vs. Volcano on the National Geographic channel. To see more of Carsten Peter’s work click here.

A member of the expedition walks on the caldera’s cooled lava floor, turned red by the reflected glow of the lake. “Down here you feel the volcano,” says photographer Carsten Peter. “It’s a low-frequency rumbling that pulses through your body – like being inside a giant subwoofer.”

Traders ferry logs and charcoal 12 miles from the forests around Nyiragongo to Goma, which continues to swell with refugees fleeing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s war-torn east. The plume rising from the mountain reminds residents of yet another threat: eruption.

Many of the porters were local women, who huddled in the cold at the crater rim.

Rising gas bubbles explode, splattering lava up to 60 feet in the air over Nyiragongo’s fiery lake.

Constant bubbling sends waves of lava lapping over the rim. Scientists aren’t sure of the lake’s depth, though recent lava samples indicate the magma originated in the Earth’s mantle more than 46 miles below.

Photographer Carsten Peter tests the thermal suit that Sims used to get close to the lava lake. “It can protect you from the radiant heat, but if you get hit with a lava splatter, the force will likely kill you,” he says. For 30 years Peter has explored volcanoes around the world. “Seeing at close range the primal forces that shaped the planet can be hypnotic. You cannot allow yourself to fall under a volcano’s spell, especially one as unpredictable as Nyiragongo. That can be a fatal mistake.”

Snowboarder v. Avalanche

Amber Terranova — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:04:22 +0000

Jussi Grznar captured this moment in the middle of Pemberton backcountry after a 40-mile snowmobile ride with Andrew Burns and the rest of the crew. This was Andrew’s first descent on this glacier. As he jumped off the 50ft drop the avalanche caught up with him. Even though completely blinded with snow Andrew rode away safely at the bottom. To see more of Grznar’s work click here.

Breathing Landscape (6 photos)

Amber Terranova — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:00:21 +0000

All Photos © Jacqueline Di Milia.

Based in New York, and more recently, California, editorial and fine art photographer, Jacqueline Di Milia, is currently working on this personal body of work about transcendence in the landscape. Each photograph is made in camera (on film) by building layers of natural imagery to create these landscapes. The final product can sometimes leave uncertainty about which fragments are real, though other images in the series take on a more collage-like approach to the landscape. The work stems from Di Milia’s interest in modern science and the surreal forces of nature.

To see more of Di Milia’s work click here.

Flight of Fancy

Amber Terranova — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 17:00:42 +0000

Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn have been collaborating as Kahn/Selesnick since 1988 on a series of complex narrative photo-novellas and sculptural installations. Their work has evolved into a series of projects involving fictional attributions, narratives, and sculpture. This staged photography features 360 degree panoramas that create a cinematic sense of place and alter the sense of time through their placement of costumes, props, and choice of color.

The two artists met at the Washington University in St. Louis where both studied photography. Kahn currently resides in Manhattan while Selesnick lives in Brooklyn. Both are now represented by Bernstein and Andriulli. To see more of their work click here.

Spanish Playground

Amber Terranova — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:00:45 +0000

London based photographer Max Forsyth has traveled throughout Ireland, Morocco, Africa and the Caribbean shooting personal work based on his attraction to color photography. He published a book called Colour Prejudice highlighting images that could not work without color. His work was widely exhibited throughout London at Hamilton’s Gallery, Lupe Gallery and the Association of Photographers Gallery. It is also in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society and the National Museum of Photography.

In 2006 Forsyth joined forces with a small group of photographers to form a high quality image library and gallery called Lensmodern. To see more of Forsyth’s work, click here.

New York: Portrait of a City (10 photos)

Amber Terranova — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:00:27 +0000

Reuel Golden, a former executive editor of PDN, has worked with art publisher Benedikt Taschen to produce New York: Portrait of a City. Setting out to be the visual encyclopedia of all things New York, Golden’s book collects hundreds of iconic images from early 1900 to present day. To find out more information about Reuel Golden’s book click here.

Tonight is the opening of the exhibition, featuring images from Golden’s book, at the Levi’s Fall Workshop in New York city. Click here for more info.

Estate of William Claxton. Above: Various jazz musicians outside the Metropole Café, the center of traditional jazz in New York, Broadway, 1960.

Herd in Iceland (12 photos)

Amber Terranova — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 16:00:37 +0000

Throughout September and early October of 2010, Lindsay Blatt and Paul Taggart are working in Iceland on a short film and photographic project documenting the historic herding of the Icelandic horse. Each year traditional herdsman take to the back country to round up thousands of horses, which have spent the summer grazing in the highlands. Throughout the three weeks of production Lindsay and Paul have been shooting on land and air, foot and hoof across the vast Icelandic landscape. To find out more about Blatt and Taggart’s Icelandic herding adventure click here.

Through the Eyes of the Vikings (8 photos)

Amber Terranova — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:00:35 +0000

Since 2002, Robert B. Haas has focused exclusively on aerial photography in a quest to capture the grandeur of all Earth’s large landmasses from the air. “Through the Eyes of the Vikings,” released today, is the third book in his collection. Hass, who previously transformed vistas of African and Latin American landscapes and cityscapes, has focused his lens on the regions that transect the Arctic Circle—Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland—which he photographed over a three-year period. This book tells a story about an endangered, raw region whose astonishing beauty is worth preserving for its own sake, and whose precarious fate will impact the entire planet.

Industrial by-products form a swirling palette at a waste-treatment facility on Langøya Island south of Oslo in Norway.

Dark clouds encroach upon the sweeping ice and snow in western Iceland.

A moose and its calf provide intersecting tracks along nearly pristine snow cover south of Inuvik in the Mackenzie River Delta, Canada.

Bay of Bothnia, Sweden. Recycling pools beside a lumber facility near the port city of Karlsborg pock the landscape like shots through tempered glass.

Snowmobile tracks crisscross the surface of a melting pond in Kiruna, Sweden.

A clam digger pokes away in search of supper along Cook Inlet in Clam Gulch, Alaska.

In Alaska, sunlight sparkles along the Neacola River’s banks and its tidal flats.